Brandon Taylor, "Minor Black Figures" (Riverhead, 2025)

Southern History Remixed: On Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Dilemma of Race (UP Florida, 2024) spotlights the key role of popular music in the shaping of the United States South from the late nineteenth century to the era of rock ’n’ roll in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. While musical activities are often sidelined in historical narratives of the region, Michael Bertrand shows that they can reveal much about social history and culture change as he connects the rise of rock ’n’ roll to the civil rights movement for racial equality. In this book, Bertrand traces a long-term culture war in which white southerners struggled over the region’s cultural complexion with music serving as an engine that both sustained and challenged white supremacy. He shows how rock ’n’ roll emerged as a working-class genre with biracial sources that stoked white racial anxieties and engaged the region’s color and culture lines. This book discusses the conflict over southern identity that played out in responses to jazz, barn dance radio, Pentecostal and gospel music, Black radio programming, and rhythm and blues, concluding with a close look at the popularity of Elvis Presley within a racially segregated society. Southern History Remixed suggests that both Black and white southerners have used music as a tool to resist or negotiate a rigid regional hierarchy. Urging readers and scholars to take the study of popular music seriously, Bertrand argues that what occurs in the music world affects and reflects what happens in politics and history. Guest: Michael T. Bertrand is a historian of the American South and the modern United States. Host: Caroline Alt (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Georgia. She studies the hauntings of the American South from the 19th through the 21st centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Dr. Lily Hseuh is trained as an economist and public policy scholar, and is an associate professor in Economics and Public Policy in the School of Public Affairs, at Arizona State University. Her research bridges the fields of economics, public policy, and management to investigate how the environment and the global commons are managed and the ways in which behaviors of firms and organizations are shaped by multiple forces from markets to government policies. During her tenure at ASU, she has been a two-time recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, as well as receiving the Professor of Impact award Her work been featured in major news outlets, including the Financial Times, Fortune, and PBS News Hour, and recently, she was awarded an American Fellowship by the American Association of University Women. She earned her PhD in Public Policy and Management from the University of Washington, and before her just published book, she has been asked to contribute a chapter to a number of other publications and has over 20 peer-reviewed articles in such areas as:  Private And Public Interactions And Global Climate Change, Rights-Based Management And Ocean And Marine Resources, Sustainability And State And Local Governments, Participatory Governance And Social Equity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The first and definitive history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives Matter era In 1779, to subjugate Indigenous nations, George Washington ordered his troops to “ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” Destroying harvests is just one way that the United States has used food as a political tool. Trying to prevent enslaved people from rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only enough to fuel labor. Since the Great Depression, school lunches have served as dumping grounds for unwanted agricultural surpluses. From frybread to government cheese, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch (Metropolitan Books, 2024) on the Ground draws on over fifteen years of research to argue that American food law and policy have created and maintained racial and social inequality. In an epic, sweeping account, Andrea Freeman, who pioneered the term “food oppression,” moves from colonization to slavery to the Americanization of immigrant food culture, to the commodities supplied to Native reservations, to milk as a symbol of white supremacy. She traces the long-standing alliance between the government and food industries that have produced gaping racial health disparities, and she shows how these practices continue to this day, through the marketing of unhealthy goods that target communities of color, causing diabetes, high blood pressure, and premature death. Ruin Their Crops on the Ground is a groundbreaking addition to the history and politics of food. It will permanently upend the notion that we freely and equally choose what we put on our plates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

A major American writer, thinker, and activist, Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of forceful, uncompromising prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as an architect and exemplar of the feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for women writers to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with many people who knew her, Hilary Holladay provides a vividly detailed, full-dimensional portrait of a woman whose work and life continue to challenge and inspire new generations in The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography (Princeton UP, 2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Most economists believe that growth is the surest path to better lives. This has proven to be one of humanity’s most powerful and dangerous ideas. It shapes policy across the globe, but it fatally undermines the natural ecosystems necessary to sustain human life. How did we get here and what might be next?In The Invention of Infinite Growth: How Economists Forgot About the Natural World (Simon and Schuster, 2025), environmental historian Christopher F. Jones takes us through two hundred and fifty years of economic thinking to examine the ideal of growth, its powerful influence, and the crippling burdens many decisions made in its name have placed on us all. Jones argues that the pursuit of growth has never reflected its costs, because economists downplay environmental degradation. What’s worse, skyrocketing inequality and diminishing improvements in most people’s well-being mean growth too often delivers too little for too many. Jones urges economists to engage more broadly with other ways of thinking, as well as with citizens and governments to recognize and slow infinite growth’s impact on the real world. Both accessible and eye-opening, The Invention of Infinite Growth offers hope for the future. Humans have not always believed that economic growth could or should continue, and so it is possible for us to change course. We can still create new ideas about how to promote environmental sustainability, human welfare, and even responsible growth, without killing the planet and ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy: The Mechanics, Costs, Risks, and Rewards (Brepols, 2025) by Dr. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio focuses on enormous amounts of sculptures moved from Italy to Spain from ca. 1500-1750. An analysis of an important body of unpublished archival documentation regarding the practical issues involved in making and transporting sculpture, provide the basis for this study of the development of technologies, infrastructure, and labor organization necessary to make such challenging transports of moving sculptures by land and sea possible. Artists, patrons, and agents had the eventual movement to a destination at the center of decision making when new sculptures were commissioned to send. Sending antiquities or second-hand works required even more planning and care. Divided into a series of case studies of major sculptures, Shipping Sculptures offers a new approach to the study of cross-cultural artistic exchange, state gifts, collecting and patronage, by examining the practical details of object movement over challenging geographies. 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/new-books-network

It is easy to believe that manners are empty gestures, little more than social artifice or practiced etiquette whose sole purpose is to project civility and facilitate social interaction. But if we look more closely, they can tell us much more than we might first suppose, revealing what conventional accounts of state, economy, and religion often ignore. With Empire of Manners: Ottoman Sociability and War-Making in the Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford UP, 2025), Dr. James Grehan offers a panoramic view of manners and sociability across the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, from the Balkans to the Middle East to North Africa. Studying chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and travel accounts, he throws new light on the inner dynamics of Ottoman society during a transitional period in Ottoman history which has too often been misunderstood. Empire of Manners proposes a new way of thinking about the history of manners, arguing that violence and war-making, as much as civility and etiquette, have a central role in shaping them. The eighteenth century proved to be a turning point in this paradoxical relationship between violence and manners as war-making turned into a substantially more complex and costly enterprise, leaving a deeper and wider social footprint. The interplay between violence and manners, an unlikely couple, unexpectedly narrates the Ottoman path to the modern age. 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/new-books-network

This is Radio ReOrient. Welcome to Season 13. This our tenth year of navigating the post-Western and connecting the Islamosphere. In this episode, Sherman Jackson joins our regular hosts, Salman Sayyid and Hizer Mir, to talk about his new book, The Islamic Secular (Oxford UP, 2024). The book provocatively challenges the assumption that the secular is external to Islam and the Islamicate. Sherman Jackson is one of the leading scholars of Islamic thought today. He holds the King Faisal Chair in Islamic Thought and Culture at the University of Southern California, where he is also Professor of Religion and of American Studies and Ethnicity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

A leading astrobiologist "demonstrates how becoming a true space-faring species is more than just humanity's future" (Adam Frank, author of The Little Book of Aliens)--it is an evolutionary event at least as important as life's first journey from sea to land The story of life has always been one of great transitions, of crossing new frontiers. The dawn of life itself is one; so, too, is the first time two cells stuck together rather than drifting apart. And perhaps most dramatic were the moves from the sea to land, land to air. Each transition has witnessed wild storms of innovation, opportunity, and hazard. It might seem that there are no more realms for life to venture. But there is one: space. In The Giant Leap: Why Space Is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life (Hachette UK, 2025), astrobiologist Caleb Scharf argues that our journey into space isn't simply a giant leap for humankind--it's life's next great transition, an evolution of evolution itself. Humans and our technology are catalysts for an interplanetary transformation, marking a disruption in the story of life as fundamental as life's movement from sea to land, and land to sky. Inspired by Darwin's account of his journey on the Beagle, and packed with stories from the past, present, and future of space travel, The Giant Leap thrills at both life's creativity and the marvels of technology that have propelled us into the cosmos. And it offers an awesome glimpse of the grander vistas that wait in the great beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton UP, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world’s largest, most advanced economies—the United States and China—have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change. By examining key historical moments—from the rise of the steam engine to the dawn of AI—Frey shows why technological shifts have shaped, and sometimes destabilized, entire civilizations. He explores why some leading technological powers of the past—such as Song China, the Dutch Republic, and Victorian Britain—ultimately lost their innovative edge, why some modern nations such as Japan had periods of rapid growth followed by stagnation, and why planned economies like the Soviet Union collapsed after brief surges of progress. Frey uncovers a recurring tension in history: while decentralization fosters the exploration of new technologies, bureaucracy is crucial for scaling them. When institutions fail to adapt to technological change, stagnation inevitably follows. Only by carefully balancing decentralization and bureaucracy can nations innovate and grow over the long term—findings that have worrying implications for the United States, Europe, China, and other economies today. Through a rich narrative that weaves together history, economics, and technology, How Progress Ends reveals that managing the future requires us to draw the right lessons from the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network