New Books in American Politics

Nov 21 2024 1315 ep. 52 mins 94

New Books in American Politics Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of American politics about their new books

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An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)

Nov 21 2024 33 mins

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transfo

Erica Benner, "Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power" (Penguin, 2024)

Nov 21 2024 52 mins

Democracy is a living, breathing thing and Dr. Erica Benner has spent a lifetime thinking about the role ordinary citizens play in keeping it alive: from her childhood in post-war Japan, where democracy was imposed on a defeated country, to working in post-communist Poland, with its sudden gaps of wealth and security. Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power (Pe

Domingo Morel, "Developing Scholars: Race, Politics, and the Pursuit of Higher Education" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Nov 19 2024 50 mins

Over the past fifty years, debates concerning race and college admissions have focused primarily on the policy of affirmative action at elite institutions of higher education. But a less well-known approach to affirmative action also emerged in the 1960s in response to urban unrest and Black and Latino political mobilization. The programs that emerged in response to community deman

Andrew Stone Higgins, "Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan" (UNC Press, 2023)

Nov 18 2024 63 mins

The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education remains to this day the largest and most ambitious attempt to provide free, universal college education in the United States. Yet the Master Plan, the product of committed Cold War liberals, unfortunately served to reinforce the very class-based exclusions and de facto racism that plagued K–12 education in the nation's largest

Karen M. Dunak, "Our Jackie: Public Claims on a Private Life" (NYU Press, 2024)

Nov 17 2024 37 mins

When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis became First Lady of the United States over sixty years ago, she stepped into the public spotlight. Although Jackie is perhaps best known for her two highly-publicized marriages, her legacy has endured beyond twentieth-century pop culture and she remains an object of public fascination today. Drawing on a range of sources– from articles penned for

Erin Lee Mock, "Changed Men: Veterans in American Popular Culture after World War II" (U Virginia Press, 2024)

Nov 16 2024 68 mins

Millions of GIs returned from overseas in 1945. A generation of men who had left their families and had learned to kill and to quickly dispatch sexual urges were rapidly reintegrated into civilian life, told to put the war behind them with cheer and confidence. Many veterans struggled, openly or privately, with this transition. Others in society wondered what the war had wrought in

D. M. Giangreco, "Truman and the Bomb: The Untold Story" (Potomac Books, 2023)

Nov 15 2024 71 mins

Many myths have grown up around President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Imperial Japan. In destroying these myths, D. M. Giangreco’s Truman and the Bomb: The Untold Story (Potomac Books, 2023) will discomfort both Truman’s critics and his supporters, and force historians to reexamine what they think they know about the end of the Pacific War. Myth:

Postscript: Reflections on the 2024 American Presidential Election

Nov 14 2024 63 mins

Many pundits are rushing to judgement – claiming to identify the “one” reason that Donald Trump won or Kamala Harris lost the 2024 Presidential Election. Today’s Postscript offers a nuanced conversation among four political scientists to gather some key take-aways and interpretive tools for looking forward to the second Trump presidency, midterms, 2028 presidential election

The Disappearance and Return of Inequality Studies in Economics

Nov 13 2024 70 mins

This is episode three Cited Podcast’s new season, the Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise. This season tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. For much of the 20th century, few economists studied inequality. “Watching the study of inequ

Anthony Grasso, "Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Nov 11 2024 58 mins

The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often nar