Episodios

  • Claudia Setzer, "The Progressives' Bible: How Scriptural Interpretation Built a More Just America" (Fortress Publishers, 2024)

    Claudia Setzer, "The Progressives' Bible: How Scriptural Interpretation Built a More Just America" (Fortress Publishers, 2024)
    Jul 18 2025
    In her book, The Progressives' Bible: How Scriptural Interpretation Built a More Just America, (Fortress Press, 2024), Claudia Setzer argues that while conservative groups have often appealed to the Bible to support their positions, so too have many progressive voices rooted in the Bible, seeing their struggles in its narratives and characters, and drawing on its verses to prove the truth of their positions. Abolitionism countered pro-slavery arguments with copious biblical material. Women's rights advocates strongly disagreed with one another about whether the Bible was good news for their cause, but some argued that it was. Temperance, a broadly inclusive reform movement in the nineteenth century, employed arguments that reflected a critical, non-literalist stance to the text. Civil rights speakers identified with biblical figures and struggles, infusing their rhetoric with familiar verses. The Progressives' Bible foregrounds women, especially women of color, like Maria Stewart, Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer, while also considering the works of crucial figures like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. A final chapter describes contemporary social justice movements that draw strength from biblical and religious traditions, from Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant perspectives. Interviewee: Claudia Setzer is a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College in Riverdale, NY. Her books include The Bible in the American Experience (co-edited with David Shefferman), The Bible and American Culture: A Sourcebook (co-edited with David Shefferman), Resurrection of the Body in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Doctrine, Community, and Self-Definition, and Jewish Responses to Early Christians: History and Polemics, 30-150 C.E. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. 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 h y 2 m
  • Ahmad Greene-Hayes, "Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

    Ahmad Greene-Hayes, "Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
    Jul 18 2025
    A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans. When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space. Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an antiblack world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms--ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more--to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions. 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 h y 6 m
  • Lily Hamourtziadou, "Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq" (Bristol UP, 2021)

    Lily Hamourtziadou, "Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq" (Bristol UP, 2021)
    Jul 16 2025
    Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq (Bristol University Press, 2021), Lily Hamourtziadou’s investigation into civilian victims during the conflicts that followed the US-led coalition’s 2003 invasion of Iraq provides important new perspectives on the human cost of the War on Terror. From early fighting to the withdrawal and return of coalition troops, the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS, the book explores the scale and causes of deaths and places them in the contexts of power struggles, US foreign policy and radicalisation. Casting fresh light on not just the conflict but international geopolitics and the history of Iraq, it constructs a unique and insightful human security approach to war. Lily Hamourtziadou is Senior Lecturer in Criminology with Security Studies and Deputy Course Director at Birmingham City University, and Principal Researcher of Iraq Body Count, which maintains the largest public database of violent civilian deaths. 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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    31 m
  • Sonia C. Gomez, "Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America" (NYU Press, 2024)

    Sonia C. Gomez, "Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America" (NYU Press, 2024)
    Jul 15 2025
    Picture Bride, War Bride examines how the institution of marriage created pockets of legal and social inclusion for Japanese women during the period of Japanese exclusion. Gomez’s work joins together an analysis of picture brides, or Japanese women who migrated to the United States to join husbands whom they married [in absentia] in the early 20th century, with war brides, or Japanese women who married American military servicemen after World War II. By combining the analysis of these two categories, Gomez centralizes the overlapping and conflicting logics to either racially exclude Japanese or facilitate their inclusion via immigration legislation that privileged wives and mothers. In short, the book tells a story of how the interplay between societal norms and political interests can both harness and contradict the interconnected frameworks of race, gender, and sexuality. Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in the department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 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 h y 4 m
  • Jeremy Black, "The Civil War" (Saint Augustine's Press, 2025)

    Jeremy Black, "The Civil War" (Saint Augustine's Press, 2025)
    Jul 14 2025
    The American Civil War may have been more consequential to American history (and its global supremacy) than its Revolutionary War and participation in all other world wars. The influence of this war is not just reduced to the victory of the north and its economic infrastructure, but the fact of Union success ushered in the notion of 'what it means to be American' that even the revolution could not instill. European military historian Jeremy Black reorients readers to see what was extraordinary in the civil war of 'the American colonies' and why this was warfare unlike anything that could be properly understood on the world stage at that time. He also examines with expertise the role of foreign powers (or lack thereof). Black's treatment might be the doom of civil war counterfactuals. Was the south destined to fail? Was it weaker motive, faulty strategy, or lack of European support? Was the north just lucky, or possessed of foresight and providential endowment? Black dispels romanticism and sentimentalist hindsight--the American Civil War is unparalleled in many respects, but it is not without clear lessons in warcraft, diplomacy, and cultural-economic impasse. Furthermore, Black's Civil War is a new resource that teaches, reaffirms, and reminds readers of the intensity of the American past--in both error and idealistic impulse--that might continue to guide us to the best future and avoid the lose-lose circumstances of a civil war. Black's acumen for historical review in this case renders a kind of warning: May the leaders of men in the future come to a better way of self-realization than give way to the internal conflict that pits father against son, and sister against brother. But if he must engage, at least understand the distinction between war and politics. Black's objective and concise account is a treasure for students and experts alike who need clarity and insight without too much of an investment. The take-away is an appreciation for the American spirit that civil strife petrified and an understanding of the tactical progression of this conflict and the context of combat of that era. 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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    30 m
  • Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, "Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War" (Basic Books, 2021)

    Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, "Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War" (Basic Books, 2021)
    Jul 14 2025
    A riveting account of the five most crucial days in twentieth-century diplomatic history: from Pearl Harbor to Hitler's declaration of war on the United States. By early December 1941, war had changed much of the world beyond recognition. Nazi Germany occupied most of the European continent, while in Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned China into a battleground. But these conflicts were not yet inextricably linked--and the United States remained at peace. Hitler's American Gamble recounts the five days that upended everything: December 7 to 11. Tracing developments in real time and backed by deep archival research, historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman show how Hitler's intervention was not the inexplicable decision of a man so bloodthirsty that he forgot all strategy, but a calculated risk that can only be understood in a truly global context. This book reveals how December 11, not Pearl Harbor, was the real watershed that created a world war and transformed international history. 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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    47 m
  • Elizabeth Popp Berman, "Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy" (Princeton UP, 2022)

    Elizabeth Popp Berman, "Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy" (Princeton UP, 2022)
    Jul 14 2025
    For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious change. What happened to bold political vision on the left, and what shrunk the very horizons of possibility? In Thinking like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman tells the story of how a distinctive way of thinking—an “economic style of reasoning”—became dominant in Washington between the 1960s and the 1980s and how it continues to dramatically narrow debates over public policy today. Introduced by liberal technocrats who hoped to improve government, this way of thinking was grounded in economics but also transformed law and policy. At its core was an economic understanding of efficiency, and its advocates often found themselves allied with Republicans and in conflict with liberal Democrats who argued for rights, equality, and limits on corporate power. By the Carter administration, economic reasoning had spread throughout government policy and laws affecting poverty, healthcare, antitrust, transportation, and the environment. Fearing waste and overspending, liberals reined in their ambitions for decades to come, even as Reagan and his Republican successors argued for economic efficiency only when it helped their own goals.A compelling account that illuminates what brought American politics to its current state, Thinking like an Economist also offers critical lessons for the future. With the political left resurgent today, Democrats seem poised to break with the past—but doing so will require abandoning the shibboleth of economic efficiency and successfully advocating new ways of thinking about policy. Elizabeth Popp Berman is Director and Richard H. Price Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan and the author of Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine (Princeton). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. 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 m
  • Alexander Lian, "Stereoscopic Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Education" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

    Alexander Lian, "Stereoscopic Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Education" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
    Jul 13 2025
    A unique and thorough work of intellectual history and legal scholarship Stereoscopic Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Education (Cambridge University Press, 2020) by Alexander Lian, a practicing commercial litigator, reconstructs Oliver Wendell Holmes’ as a pioneering legal pedagogue and sophisticated theoretician of law and the ‘reality of practice’. Lian advances the thesis that the most famous article in American jurisprudence, Oliver Wendell Holmes's “The Path of the Law,” presents Holmes' perspective on legal education. Through meticulous analysis, Lian cogently shows that Holmes’ ‘theory of legal study’ broke down artificial barriers between theory and practice. For contemporary legal educators—and anyone interested in the history of America’s legal tradition—Stereoscopic Law reformulates Holmes’ fundamental message: the law must be seen, taught, and practiced three-dimensionally. Alexandar Lian practices commercial litigation in Miami, FL. Since 2008, he has been a solo practitioner. Alexander Lian is a graduate of both the Graduate and Law Schools of Vanderbilt University. He has represented clients in a variety of contested matters ranging from high dollar contract disputes and real property disputes to the prosecution and collection of large judgments totaling in the millions. He is also a Florida Supreme Court Qualified Arbitrator and, formerly, president of COLBAR (Colombian American Bar Association). Ayushi Singh is a graduate student at IIT Gandhinagar, India. 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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    38 m