New Books in the American South

New Books Network
  • 4.3 (6)
  • Books
  • Updated Semiweekly

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

  1. Aug 17

    Kiara Wyndham, "Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb" (U California Press, 2026)

    Fort Bend County, Texas, looks like the America we claim to want: a suburb where Black, White, Asian, and Latinx families share cul-de-sacs, schools, and celebrations. Residents trade dishes, honor one another's traditions, and take pride in their community's diversity. Yet beneath this harmony lies what sociologist Dr. Kiara Wyndham calls "the diversity contract"—an unspoken agreement that racial diversity may be celebrated, but racial inequality must not be named.  Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and more than 150 interviews, Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb (University of California Press, 2026) reveals how the language of inclusion can obscure enduring racial hierarchy. In Fort Bend and communities like it, White advantage adapts to diversity rather than disappearing. Vivid and deeply researched, Diversityland transforms how we understand suburban life and challenges foundational narratives of what racial progress will look like in 21st century America. 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-south

  2. Aug 14

    Daniel Byman, "American Pogroms: How Forgotten Massacres Shape America" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Amidst heightened rhetoric and increasing polarization in the United States, American Pogroms: How Forgotten Massacres Shape America (Oxford University Press, 2026) chronicles the causes and consequences of two centuries of mob violence in American history, highlighting exactly what's at stake when we allow leaders to legitimate violence and the mob to rule. For much of American history, members of the majority population of the United States indiscriminately attacked and terrorized minority communities. In some parts of the country, mob violence seemed a near-constant part of the region's history, while in others it was a brief, horrific spasm that perpetrators--but not victims--quickly forgot. In American Pogroms, terrorism expert Daniel Byman argues that there is a word for this type of communal violence: pogrom. Although pogroms are historically associated with the orchestrated campaigns of anti-Jewish violence in Tsarist Russia, Byman asserts that pogroms have been an all-too-frequent feature of American history. Tracing two centuries of communal violence, Byman recounts cases of attacks against American religious minorities such as Catholics and Mormons, the killing of thousands of ethnic Mexicans in Texas, the murder and wholesale expulsion of Chinese workers from the American West, and the repeated attacks on the Black community that killed thousands and enabled decades of brutal discrimination. In all these cases, pogroms helped cement a system of injustice that left religious, ethnic, and racial minorities politically and economically marginalized. While the idea of mob violence now strikes most Americans as unthinkable, Byman warns that increased polarization and selective news consumption in recent years has coarsened discourse and legitimized violence, raising the risk that at least some violence will return. A broad-ranging synthesis of how and why majorities have so frequently resorted to community-level violence to restore or cement their power, American Pogroms illustrates the outsized role of violence in U.S. history and how it shapes the country today. Daniel Byman is a Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

  3. Aug 12

    Jarvis C. McInnis, "Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South" (Columbia UP, 2025)

    Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures. Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee’svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee’s methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil. Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

  4. Aug 3

    Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, "Seeking Freedom in Indian Country: Slavery, Sovereignty, and Resistance Within the Five Tribes, 1790–1861" (LSU Press, 2026)

    Dr. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel’s Seeking Freedom in Indian Country: Slavery, Sovereignty, and Resistance within the Five Tribes, 1790–1861 (LSU Press, 2026) is the first comprehensive study of African chattel slavery within the Five Tribes: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations. Dr. Oertel examines how chattel slavery functioned among all Five Tribes before and during the removal process, how the tribes reconstituted slavery post-removal in Indian Territory, and how enslaved Black people promoted freedom-seeking strategies at each stage. Furthermore, her work considers how the conflict over slavery in Indian Territory contributed to the larger national debate over slavery’s fate on the eve of the Civil War. Historians have examined how the practice of African enslavement emerged within one or two tribes, how forced migration affected slavery within particular nations, and how the debate over slavery divided multiple Indigenous nations. Dr. Oertel, however, is the first to examine Indian Territory as a whole, its significance to the sectional debates, and its role as an incubator of emancipation policies in the United States. Knitting together these individual tribal narratives and supplementing them with extensive primary research on how slavery functioned across Indian Territory, she integrates Indian country into the antebellum march toward the Civil War. Seeking Freedom in Indian Country joins a rising chorus of studies that integrate southern and western history, which, by default, also pulls together the history of the so-called Indian Wars with the Civil War. Dr. Oertel suggests that we cannot fully understand the causes of the Civil War without also considering the changes brought about by the forced removal of Indians. She argues that settler colonialism and the expansion of African chattel slavery together set the stage for sectional conflict to explode in the West. Ironically, both Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism and Black resistance to slavery challenged white supremacy in ways that foretold the end of slavery but also furthered the settler colonial project. 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-south

  5. Aug 1

    Virginia McGee Richards, "The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway" (MIT Press, 2026)

    Some of the earliest canals in colonial America, referred to as the Inner Passage, were constructed by enslaved people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 1700s. In a paradox of history, for over a hundred years enslaved Black people used these canals, constructed for white plantation owners, to travel southward to freedom in Spanish Florida. In The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway (MIT Press, 2026), Virginia McGee Richards documents the lost narrative of the Inner Passage through 60 extraordinary photographs of landscapes altered by slavery and portraits of Lowcountry descendants, along with an essay describing her discovery of this untold history. In an accompanying essay, Imani Perry writes about her own journey on the Inner Passage, putting Black resistance to enslavement and Southern history into an immediate context. James Estrin brings decades of insight about photography and the power of visual storytelling to his affecting foreword. Together, these words and images offer a powerful living map of history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

  6. Jul 30

    Robert Lee Maril, "Hungry Oklahoma: Confronting Poverty and Food Insecurity" (U Oklahoma Press, 2026)

    In Oklahoma, one out of every six residents is poor. One in five children lives in poverty and faces food insecurity. In Hungry Oklahoma: Confronting Poverty and Food Insecurity (U Oklahoma Press, 2026), native son and sociologist Robert Lee Maril follows in the tradition of the national bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Evicted to illuminate the lived experience of poverty and food insecurity in communities across the state. Maril's account is immediately personal. He begins with "guests," as shoppers are called by volunteers, waiting in line in the sweltering heat one summer for "Thy Will Be Done," a food pantry, to open. Unable to afford air conditioning, some guests don't buy foods that would spoil on the counter. One woman, Norma, carefully places only canned vegetables in her cart. When she returns to her twenty-year-old pickup, in the truck bed are lawn chairs, blankets, and pans-everything she owns. "The landlord told us this morning we was homeless," Norma says. "I'm not thinking straight." Drawing on interviews and participant-observation data from his volunteer work at a food pantry, as well as census and sociological data, Maril documents in rich ethnographic detail the status of poverty and low-wage workers in the state today and within historical context. He explores how institutions-such as faith-based organizations, government, and food pantries-structure and shape experiences of poverty. While Maril celebrates the nonprofit and faith-based efforts that make a difference, this book also is critical of conditions and stereotypes that have entrenched poverty in the state. Hungry Oklahoma ultimately suggests that persistent and pervasive poverty can be eliminated. Its moving accounts of real Oklahomans and their experiences make it a clarion call for not only those interested in policy issues but all Oklahomans who want a better today and tomorrow for those who call the state home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

  7. Jul 24

    Lily Kelting, "Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods" (UNC Press, 2026)

    The rise of “heritage” foods—that is, the reinvention of traditional foods—has enjoyed a high profile thanks to the oft-praised efforts of chefs such as Sean Brock and René Redzepi. But Lily Kelting observes the popularity of heritage foods as something more: a global movement in response to climate catastrophe and the rise of right-wing, populist movements that center a return to the past as part of their ideology. Weaving ethnography, discourse analysis, critical theory, and sensory, embodied critique, Kelting tracks and critiques the boom of traditional food revival movements in the American South, Denmark, and India. Ultimately, Kelting argues that the heritage culinary professionals wish to revive is equal parts nostalgia and invention: They engage, subvert, and ignore food histories in their creation of new food movements. As Kelting documents our contemporary moment, she shows how the conversations surrounding these new food movements leave out people already keeping their traditions alive. Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), then, serves as a reparative revaluation of the work of the cooks largely excluded from the contemporary media conversation about heritage revival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

  8. Jul 18

    Angela Frederick, "Disabled Power: A Storm, A Grid, and Embodied Harm in the Age of Disaster" (NYU Press, 2025)

    A call to place disability at the center of climate and disaster responsesEvery disaster is a disability disaster, argues Angela Frederick. Disabled Power: A Storm, A Grid, and Embodied Harm in the Age of Disaster (NYU Press, 2025) tells the stories of Texans with disabilities who endured the 2021 Texas power crisis, which forced millions of Texas residents to endure a dayslong winter storm without heat or water. Based on 58 in-depth interviews with disabled Texans and parents of disabled children, Frederick highlights how disabled people and those with chronic health conditions are uniquely harmed when basic infrastructure such as power and water systems fail. She argues that the vulnerability people with disabilities experienced during this disaster was not an inevitable consequence of individual disabled bodies. Rather, disability vulnerability was “produced” by policies that “disabled” vital infrastructure.Frederick also emphasizes another meaning of the phrase “disabled power:” the individual and collective resilience and creativity Texans with disabilities exercised to survive the disaster. Despite common perceptions of people with disabilities as passive victims, Frederick shows how many found strategies to survive and to provide and receive care within their communities. Ultimately, the implications of this disaster extend far beyond Texas and underscore our increased vulnerability to infrastructural failures as extreme weather events become more common. Disabled Power offers a blueprint for reimagining vulnerability and resilience to center people with disabilities in disaster research and emergency response. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

See All (562)

Ratings & Reviews

4.3
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Information

You Might Also Like