David Beito's new book brings to bear the latest historical scholarship to shed light on the life and achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Professor Beito traces the irresistible political rise of Roosevelt, a scion of inherited wealth who never posed as a man of the people but was always perceived as a genial aristocrat. As well as eyebrow-raising disclosures on FDR's private life, Beito's narrative brings out Roosevelt's ruthless opportunism, and his susceptibility to all the prejudicial...
Nov 07, 2025•32 min•Ep. 222
At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan’s first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., and founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also the chief architect of legislation that restored home rule to Washington, DC, and almost single-handedly igni...
Nov 06, 2025•55 min
Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi (UP Mississippi, 2025) chronicles the profound history of a low-income county that became a pivotal site for Delta organizing during the civil rights movement. Landowning African American farmers, who enjoyed more economic independence than sharecroppers, emerged as the grassroots leaders of the movement. The volume begins with the county’s Native American heritage, moving through ...
Nov 06, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 72
Political Scientists Jack Greenberg (Yale University) and John Dearborn (Vanderbilt University) have a new book that focuses on the idea of presidential self-restraint and the ways in which the U.S. Congress has tried to design Executive positions with an eye towards making real this dimension of presidential norms. The concept of presidential self-restraint is a component of how the president uses his/her executive powers: that the president has a certain expanse of power and chooses, based on ...
Nov 05, 2025•48 min•Ep. 787
Antiabortion stories, images, and policies have primed Americans to embrace attitudes and politics once deemed extreme. Abroad, US antiabortion tactics, personnel, and funds have contributed to a global rise of the Right. From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary (University of California Press, 2025) is a scholar’s story of why and how abortion foes join other militants in waging war against the federal government. Reflecting on her thirty years of analyzing ...
Nov 05, 2025•57 min
In the fourth edition of Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present, drawing on important feminist concepts -- social reproduction, the gender division of labor, and patriarchy -- Mimi Abramovitz exposes the gendered and racialized myths and stereotypes built into welfare state programs. The book explains the contextual conditions that contributed to the precursors of the modern welfare state, its rise and expansion after World War II, and the recent ...
Nov 04, 2025•30 min•Ep. 223
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 expedited the entry of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial South Asia and sent them to provide care in shortage areas throughout the United States. Although this arrangement was conceived as tempor...
Nov 03, 2025•52 min
One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three decades. Our era is one of sexual upheaval. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, school systems across the country are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and the notion of a “tradwife” is gaining adherents on the right while po...
Nov 03, 2025•59 min
During the Great Depression, the proliferation of local taxpayers’ associations was dramatic and unprecedented. The justly concerned members of these organizations examined the operations of state, city, and county governments, then pressed local officials for operational and fiscal reforms. These associations aimed to reduce the cost of state and local governments to make operations more efficient and less expensive. "Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender": Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Pol...
Nov 02, 2025•46 min
Winner of The 74th National Jewish Book Award: American Jewish Studies Celebrate 350 Award Reveals the mass mobilization tactics that helped free Soviet Jews and reshaped the Jewish American experience from the Johnson era through the Reagan–Bush years What do these things have in common? Ingrid Bergman, Passover matzoh, Banana Republic®, the fitness craze, the Philadelphia Flyers, B-grade spy movies, and ten thousand Bar and Bat Mitzvah sermons? Nothing, except that social movement activis...
Nov 02, 2025•36 min
When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike out on his own. With a specialized knowledge of finance and close connections to top Washington officials, Kiplinger was uniquely positioned to tell deeper truths about the intersections between government and business. With careful reporting and insider access, he delivered perceptive analysis and forecasts of business, economic, and political news...
Oct 31, 2025•23 min
A podcast from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy Center on Global Democracy About the Podcast Each week, co-hosts Rachel Beatty Riedl and Esam Boraey bring together leading scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to explore the challenges and possibilities facing democracy around the world. Produced by Cornell’s Center on Global Democracy, Democratic Dialogues bridges academic research with real-world debates — from democratic backsliding and authoritarian resurgence to civic...
Oct 28, 2025•42 min
Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back (Princeton UP, 2025) shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: thast the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, as Joshua Clark Davis shows, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee confronted police abuses head-on, staging sit-ins at precinct stations, picketing outside department he...
Oct 28, 2025•1 hr 26 min
Every year, hundreds of international student athletes arrive in the U.S. chasing their basketball dreams — many on F-1 student visas. But for some their journey turns into exploitation. Basketball Trafficking: Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams (Duke University Press, 2025) uncovers how dreams are sold, manipulated, and in some cases stolen — especially for young Black athletes from the Global South. This book offers a powerful call to action for educators, institutions, and sport leaders to safegu...
Oct 26, 2025•1 hr 7 min
Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the prison years of civil rights icon Malcolm X. The book was a Kirkus Nonfiction Book of the Year for 2024, a Spectator best book of the year, and a finalist for the 2025 ASALH book prize. In February 1946, when 20-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler i...
Oct 26, 2025•26 min
Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its preference for practicality has not adopted the most practical, scientific, and innovative system of measurement? Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America (Vanderbilt UP, 2025) by Dr. Hector Vera answers these questions by analyzing the political, economic, and international factors that determined the trajectory of the United States as a na...
Oct 25, 2025•58 min
National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on the experience of the rural working class in the US. Her essay in The Common ’s fall 2014 issue, “ Death of the Farm Family ,” became part of her 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth , which became an instant New York Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Kirku...
Oct 25, 2025•1 hr 5 min
The humble goat has played a surprising and important role throughout the history of the United States. Despite this, goats are often overlooked by many Americans, even if they have strong opinions about these complex creatures. In Goats in America: A Cultural History (Oregon State UP, 2025) Dr. Tami Parr calls attention to these disregarded animals, uncovering the remarkable stories behind everything from goat meat and milk to goat yoga and more. Since arriving in North America with cattle and ...
Oct 23, 2025•50 min
Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings influence the world's perception of Mexico. Mexico's so-called drug war, as generally conceived by journalists and academics, was the product of recent cartel turf wars, the end of the PRI's single party rule in 2000, and enhanced US border security measures post-9/11. These explanations are compelling, but they overlook state actions beginning in ...
Oct 22, 2025•55 min
The adoption of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965, triggered a wave of immigration to the U.S. not seen since before the First World War. But these newcomers were now far less likely to have come from Europe than Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. And they were far more likely to settle in suburbia than the “inner city.” In The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford UP, 2024) Becky M. Nicolaides analyzes the consequences of mass migration by looking at h...
Oct 22, 2025•39 min
Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers (UVA Press, 2025) explores the local dynamics, national connections, and global context of the Black freedom movement in Harlem from 1954 to 1964, illuminating how activists, organizers, and ordinary people mounted their resistance to systemic racism in the Jim Crow North. The richness of Black radical thought and action in this period made Harlem a key battleground in the national civil rights moveme...
Oct 21, 2025•1 hr 21 min
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it. In the twenty-one conversations contained in this engaging and highly accessible book, we hear from the musicians themselves, in their own words, direct and unfiltered. Peter Zimmerman’s interviewing technique is straightforward. He turns on a recording device, poses questions, and allows his subjects to improvise, similar to the way the musicians...
Oct 20, 2025•56 min•Ep. 148
“No country is ever just one thing.” In her new book Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021), NYU historian Ada Ferrer shows this again and again. In clear and engaging prose, Ferrer narrates five centuries of history from a decidedly different angle than previous one-volume studies; the main drivers of history in this book are not just familiar political figures and abstract historical forces, but a whole range of typically marginalized historical actors. Ferrer integrates the voices of the ...
Oct 19, 2025•53 min•Ep. 75
Upstate New York's Anti-Rent Movement is considered the last struggle over feudalism in the United States. Tenant farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk region engaged in organized protest throughout the 1840s to contest monopoly ownership of the land they worked. Arguing their cause in newspapers, on broadsides, and at rallies, their aspirations also took shape in poetry and song. More than twenty sets of lyrics (and one instrumental composition) were written at various stages of the conflict. Some of th...
Oct 18, 2025•54 min
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 movem...
Oct 17, 2025•1 hr 4 min
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 consumpti...
Oct 17, 2025•1 hr 1 min
A veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films of all time, Saving Private Ryan . From rural beginnings in northwestern Iowa, Sampson’s life would take him from the University of Notre Dame to the battlefields of Normandy on D-Day, the ambitious failure of Operation Market Garden, the harshness of a winter as a POW of the Germans during the closing stages of the Second World War, to the fall o...
Oct 16, 2025•48 min•Ep. 31
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl , Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP’s increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. ...
Oct 15, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 302
Suggested additional channels: Political Science, National Security, American Politics, Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern European Studies, New Books with Miranda Melcher NB: I don’t think this needs to go on General History The no-fly zone is a frequently used instrument in the US foreign policy arsenal, despite detrimental, or even catastrophic, results. This book examines why the instrument has such a hold on leaders’ imaginations and rhetoric despite its patchy record in practice. Examining de...
Oct 14, 2025•49 min•Ep. 143
In American Judaism today, Orthodoxy is the fastest growing movement. However, Orthodoxy is anything but monolithic. Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945–2025 by Lawrence Grossman explores a piece of the Orthodox story, that of Modern Orthodoxy. For those who may be unfamiliar, Modern Orthodoxy affirms the traditional tenets and practices of Orthodox Judaism while at the same time maintaining an openness to contemporary cultural and intellectual developments....
Oct 13, 2025•55 min•Ep. 683
