New Books in the American South

New Books Network
  • 4.3 (6)
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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. 4d ago

    Spanish Louisiana: Contest for Borderlands, 1763–1803 with Frances Kolb Turnbell (LSU Press, 2024)

    Sandwiched between the long period of French colonization, and the brief return to the French empire before the Americans enter the scene, the Spanish period of Louisiana's history is often ignored by historians. Yet, according to University of North Alabama historian Frances Kolb Turnbell, scholars of Vast Early America and the American West ignore this three decade period at their own peril. In Spanish Louisiana: Contest for Borderlands, 1763-1803 (LSU Press, 2024), Turnbell argues that the Spanish period of Louisiana's history is a prime example of historical contingency. The people - Black, white, Indigenous, and the many who straddled such categories - assumed the colony would stay in Spanish hands indefinitely, and made choices based on that assumption. The actions of Native people or American traders only make sense through this specific and contextual lens. And although this Spanish period did come to a close, its legacy endured well into the American period of the region's history. An excellent example of borderlands history, Turnbell's book urges scholars to reevaluate the history of the American West during the revolutionary period to uncover what else may have been missed beneath the Mississippi's murky waters and lush bayous. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  2. 6d ago

    An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America with Keri Leigh Merritt (St. Martin's Press, 2026)

    Born in Florida to a religious family, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: She lived with her lover, Paula, first running a summer camp in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and then a magazine devoted to creating a new vision of the South, one that passionately championed equality and integration. Smith published Black and white writers, a rare feat in those days, and herself wrote articles instructing white Southerners on why they shouldn’t support segregation—Smith firmly believed racism hurt white Americans, too. In 1944 she published a bestselling novel, Strange Fruit, which became a national sensation and was banned in Boston and Detroit. The FBI began a file on her, she received death threats, and her house caught fire three times, twice intentionally, resulting in the loss of all her works-in-progress and her correspondence. Undaunted, she continued her ardent fight against segregation, maintaining correspondence with some of the great leaders of her day, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, W. E. B. Dubois, Paul Robeson, and Pauli Murray. She continued to fight for both civil and human rights throughout the 1960s, helping nurture many of the activists in SNCC and CORE, only to succumb to cancer in 1966. Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, and with a modern appreciation of Smith’s complex identity, An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America (St. Martin's Press, 2026) is the definitive account of a woman who defied all expectations and dedicated her life to racial equality. Guest: Keri Leigh Merritt, Ph.D. is a historian and writer. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, won both the Bennett Wall Award from the Southern Historical Association as well as the President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association. She has co-edited several other books, including After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America, and her articles have appeared in outlets from Smithsonian and Aeon to The Hill and CNN. Host: Raymond Williams, PhD, is a political scientist, blogger, and book club administrator with an interest in American history, biographies, and politics. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  3. Oct 13

    Chicana Spiritual Activism: Making Change, Making Soul with Brenda L. Sendejo (U Arizona Press, 2026)

    Chicana Spiritual Activism: Making Change, Making Soul (U Arizona Press, 2026) explores the profound impact of spiritual activism within the Chicana feminist movement in Texas. It illuminates how a cohort of Texas Chicanas embraced spiritual activism in pursuit of social change during the movement and into the present day. The book draws on an array of qualitative methodologies—including interviews, autoethnography, testimonio, pláticas, and archival analysis—to develop what the author formulates as “methodologies of the spirit.” Focusing on the lived experiences, histories, and spiritual activism of sixteen Chicanas/Tejanas, Sendejo shows how these trailblazing women confronted the enduring impacts and repercussions of colonial legacies in Texas through their involvement in movement initiatives such as electoral politics through Mujeres Por La Raza, the cultural arts movement, developing Chicana feminist thought, and the establishment of bilingual education and Chicana/o studies programs. The activists highlighted in the book include well-known figures such as Santa Barraza, Norma E. Cantú, Rosie Castro, Martha P. Cotera, Inés Hernández-Ávila, and others. Through their work, these activists emerged as architects of their own healing and transformation. Simultaneously, they opened avenues for others to embark on similar journeys reshaping religious practices and unearthing and disseminating spiritual, feminist, and ancestral knowledges. This interview was conducted by Mary Reynolds, publicity manager for The University of Arizona Press. Her book, The Quake That Drained the Desert, investigates the 1887 borderlands earthquake that forever changed surface water and groundwater in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  4. Oct 13

    Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South with Lauren Nicole Henley (LSU Press, 2026)

    For three years in the early 1900s, a serial killer zigzagged across the rice belt region of the United States, using an everyday ax to slaughter Black families living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route. The similarities among the murders were uncanny, yet lawmen in early twentieth-century America had neither the technology nor the vocabulary to identify the serial killer in their midst. Instead, regional authorities worked the cases as individual homicides.This approach led to seemingly contradictory realities: the unknown killer was dubbed “the axman,” and a young Black woman named Clementine Barnabet was arrested as a suspect. She offered questionable confessions and swiftly gained international recognition, as the press reimagined Clementine as a cult-leading, ax-wielding, sacrifice-driven serial killer. But there was a problem: Clementine was already in jail by the time more than half of the murders occurred.In Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South with Lauren Nicole Henley (LSU Press, 2026), Lauren Nicole Henley examines this conundrum as she describes how axman madness consumed an entire region for years. She unpacks these crimes and their aftermaths to show how Black communities responded to incomprehensible violence, how the state criminalized Blackness, and how a young Black woman ultimately came to be understood as a serial killer. Drawing on more than three thousand newspaper articles, hundreds of pages of court records, prison ledgers, death certificates, censuses, city directories, and more, Henley tells a historical narrative that is as intriguing as any true crime novel, challenging our assumptions about who has the ability to get away with murder. Dr. Lauren Henley is an assistant professor in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on violent crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She investigates how age, race, gender, and religion contribute to perceptions of criminality in the South and West, and her articles have appeared in the Journal of African American History and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. You can find her at the University of Richmond website. Following this conversation, Lauren and Sullivan went over to the Additions to the Archive Substack to continue their conversation about writing historical figures who, like Clementine Barnabet, don’t neatly fit the respectable boxes we would like for them.  Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  5. Oct 8

    The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915

    When American fascists suddenly goose-stepped down Main Street in the 1930s, fascism was seen by the rest of the country as a terrifying and radical new European import. It was not. It didn’t come from abroad. Nor was it new or radical. The seed of American fascism was planted by elite southern planters who insisted that slavery need not be addressed in the Constitution because it would soon die out on its own. In The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915 (Bloomsbury, 2026), Joseph Kelly chronicles fascism’s deep roots in the antebellum South; its codification under Jim Crow; and, then, after the Spanish American War, its ascendency in the form of Anglo-Saxon nationalism, proposing that the nation belongs to a master-race-the original lie of American fascism. Dr. Kelly’s gripping book reminds us that the monied elite have always exceled at deploying disinformation to bias and inflame the masses, and that there have always been courageous patriots helping us to fight our way out of darkness toward the light. Guest: Dr. Kelly is a professor of literature and history at the college of Charleston. He is the author of Marooned, The Biggest Lie, and America’s Longest Siege. Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast and newsletter. She works as a writing coach and developmental editor for academics. Listeners may also be interested in: Paper HeroinesNo Common GroundThy Will Be DonePreparing for WarUnderstanding DisinformationCampus MonumentsWhat Might BeThe Social Constructions of RaceTeaching About Race and Racism in the College ClassroomBelongingWelcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 325+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  6. Oct 6

    Flannery and Regina: The Andalusia Chronicles with Carol Loeb Shloss

    The story of two women in the mid-twentieth-century South navigating financial independence, a changing rural landscape, and social norms. Flannery and Regina: The Andalusia Chronicles (NewSouth Books, 2026) tells the story of Flannery O’Connor and her mother, Regina, after Flannery’s lupus diagnosis forced her to move back to Milledgeville, Georgia. Just as her career as one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished writers of short fiction was beginning to take off, the disease that killed her father confined her to the family farm, Andalusia. The book fills in the gaps for fans of Flannery on the role of Regina in her life but more broadly presents a story of two women in the South of the 1950s and 1960s navigating financial independence, a changing rural landscape, and social norms.It’s a story of a mother and daughter, sometimes understanding each other, often not, but trying to cobble together parallel and overlapping lives. Perhaps most interesting to readers of O’Connor, or anyone interested in the biography of an author no longer able to control a public image, is the detailing of how Regina tried to direct and cultivate Flannery’s image after her death, though we get the sense she understood very little of her daughter as an artist. Carol Loeb Shloss is a former acting professor of English and Irish literature at Stanford University. Widely known for her work on modernist writers, her books include Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, a Pulitzer Prize nominee and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Let the Wind Speak: Mary de Rachewiltz and Ezra Pound; Flannery O’Connor’s Dark Comedies: The Limits of Inference; and two books on literature and photography. Since writing her seminal book on Flannery O’Connor in 1980, she has published essays and reviews in Flannery O’Connor Review and many other journals. She currently resides in Philadelphia. Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, available here on the New Books Network and wherever podcasts are found. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  7. Sep 30

    Strong State, Weak Links: Eugenics and the Southern Politics of Welfare with Anna Krome-Lukens (UNC Press, 2026)

    In the early twentieth century, most US states established eugenics programs to improve the human race through selective breeding. North Carolina ran one of the nation's most aggressive programs; between 1927 and 1977, at least 5,700 people were sterilized and thousands more were committed to institutions. While sterilizations in the 1950s and 1960s disproportionately targeted Black women receiving public assistance, the program's early focus was on poor white women. These policies were framed as scientific and progressive, yet they were deeply intertwined with racial and class biases, reflecting long-standing social hierarchies in the South. Anna Krome-Lukens examines those early years and reveals how such white reformers as social workers, politicians, and activists promoted the principles of eugenics while shaping the emerging welfare state before and during the New Deal. Tracing this history, the book illuminates how North Carolina's eugenics programs influenced the modern welfare state and how their legacy continues to shape debates over social policy today.  The episode brings the Book Review Managing Editor of the Journal of Women's History, Ariel Schnee (History PhD Candidate, University of Oklahoma), into conversation with the book's author, historian and scholar of public policy Dr. Anna Krome-Lukens (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill). Copies of Strong State, Weak Links: Eugenics and the Southern Politics of Welfare (UNC Press, 2026) can be found at the University of North Carolina Press website. The Journal of Women's History can be found here and online at Project Muse. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  8. Sep 25

    The Story of North Carolina's Research Triangle Park with Mack Paul

    Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (RTP) emerged under the unique circumstances of a poor Southern state that needed to find a way to offset the declining industries of tobacco, furniture, and textiles in the 1950s. Through the sustained commitment of nearby universities, business leaders, and local and state officials, state leaders established the largest science and research park in the United States in an area that was nothing but “possums and pines.” Miracle Road: The Story of Research Triangle Park (Duke University Press, 2026) tells this story through the eyes of those at the center of it, like the local black leaders who convinced white officials to desegregate public schools with the justification that it would make the area more appealing to tech companies, or how a chance meeting between the governor and a Danish executive led to North Carolina becoming an epicenter for weight loss drugmakers decades later. Allen Paul and Mack Paul organize the story around major periods in RTP’s growth, showing how RTP came to define the region and the state by the 1990s as well as the major setbacks it encountered in the early 2000s. Breaking down the strategies that led to RTP’s success, like creating new institutions in targeted tech areas to spur activity and factoring quality of life into the regional planning of the area, Miracle Road demonstrates how the story of Research Triangle Park is a fascinating and important case study of urban development in the twenty-first century.Mack Paul cofounded Morningstar Law Group, where he is a partner. He teaches land use law at North Carolina State University and North Carolina Central University. Mack served as chair of the Greater Triangle Regional Council and has written extensively about the development of the Triangle Region. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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4.3
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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

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