Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Area Studies
  4. American studies
  5. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

53463 results in American studies

Page 1 of 2674

A History of the Mexican Novel

Disability in Black and White
  • The Racial Politics of Disability Rights in the United States
  • Jennifer L. Erkulwater
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2027
    Print publication:
    31 January 2027

History's Most Revolutionary Innovation
  • AI and Its Origins and Impact
  • Victor Menaldo
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2026
    Print publication:
    31 December 2026
  • In History's Most Revolutionary Innovation, Victor Menaldo shows that America's AI dominance was not an accident of entrepreneurial culture or free markets. It was engineered — through four decades of bipartisan reforms to intellectual property, antitrust, telecommunications, and trade policy that quietly built the legal and economic scaffolding the digital economy required. Situating AI within the lineage of previous general purpose technologies like steam engines, electricity, and the microchip, and tracing its full arc from semiconductors to smartphones to large language models, Menaldo shows how a handful of dominant firms simultaneously captured outsized returns and spread innovation across global supply chains — and asks what happens now that the US, China, and the EU are retreating into competing, gated technology regimes. The result is the first comprehensive account of where AI came from, why its benefits have been uneven, and what will determine whether the AI revolution lifts living standards.

The Cambridge Introduction to Phillis Wheatley Peters
  • Vincent Carretta
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2026
    Print publication:
    31 December 2026
  • In 1773 Phillis Wheatley Peters became the first person of African descent to publish a book, when she was barely twenty years old, and still enslaved. Her book made her the earliest international celebrity of African descent, just a dozen years after she had been brought from Africa to America. She became the unofficial poet laureate of the American Revolution, only to die in poverty and relative obscurity in 1784. Recent biographical discoveries related to John Peters and Phillis Wheatley's marriage to him in 1778 have led to significant reassessments of her life and character. As the Cambridge Introduction to Phillis Wheatley Peters demonstrates, she has subsequently become recognized as a pioneer of American and African American literature. Her standing as a transnational literary figure is increasingly appreciated as criticism of her writings has become more sophisticated.

Making America a Democracy Again
  • How to Fix Our Political Dysfunction
  • David Orentlicher
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2026
    Print publication:
    31 December 2026

Shaping a Peaceful World
  • The United States and Post-conflict Diplomacy since 1789
  • Edited by Kelly M. McFarland, Andrew L. Johns, Brian C. Etheridge
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026
  • The United States has fought wars throughout its history. But how has it attempted to shape a peaceful world in the wake of these conflicts? This volume explores the long US history of post-conflict diplomacy – from the early republic, through the aftermath of World War II, to recent global engagements. Through richly detailed essays, it examines how power, race, and individual agency shaped US efforts to rebuild relationships after war. Moving beyond simplistic narratives, the book reveals the complexity of forging peace and its unintended consequences. It highlights pivotal moments when alliances were born, rivalries transformed, and non-governmental actors influenced outcomes as much as statesmen. Essential for scholars, policymakers, and readers seeking insight into how past strategies inform present decisions, this work reframes America's diplomatic legacy and offers lessons for future interventions. Bold, comparative, and deeply researched, it illuminates the challenges – and possibilities – of building peace after conflict.

Super PACs in the City
  • How Outside Money Is Reshaping Local Elections
  • Henrik M. Schatzinger
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026

Unruly Acts
  • Protest, Riot, and the Politics of Interpretation
  • Stacey Liou
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026

Even in the Lawless Seas
  • Legal Imagination and Oceanic History in the World of Herman Melville
  • Matthew Crow
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026

American Song and Struggle from World War II to MAGA
  • A Cultural History
  • Will Kaufman
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • Will Kaufman now brings his award-winning cultural history up to the present: to a USA poised on the brink of autocracy under Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. His second instalment explores songs from all genres that respond to war, racism, sexism, terrorism, the climate emergency and political oppression: including the crisis of Trumpism itself. The struggles of the American project have always, the author reveals, been sung into history; and his aim is to preserve and continue this venerable tradition. The musical sweep is broad. It includes Indigenous and immigrant songs, the Broadway musical, opera, symphonic music, swing, bebop, free jazz, avant-garde and electronica, Puerto Rican and Hawaiian resistance anthems, Mexican corridos, blues, rock, soul, country, folk, gospel, punk, riot grrrl, heavy metal, disco, hip-hop, rap, and reggaeton. Revealing the myriad ways in which American song reflects the fight for social and political justice, it is an essential intervention.

Pardons
  • Discretionary Mercy and the Rule of Law in Britain and America, 1066–2026
  • Frank O. Bowman III
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026

Camp Ford's Civil War
  • Captivity, Community, and Nature in the Dark Corner of the Confederacy
  • Matthew M. Stith
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • Camp Ford's Civil War tells the story of Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians, enslaved people and refugees, and the natural world around them during the Civil War. The focal point is a ten-acre piece of land where nearly 5,000 Union prisoners of war sat out of battle while fighting their own distinctive kind of war. The narrative also explains the conflict in the wider southern Trans-Mississippi theater, a place that remains in the historical and historiographical shadow of the Civil War elsewhere. This is a story of what became of the largest prisoner of war camp west of the Mississippi River, but it is also a story about the war in the 200 mile radius around the prison camp - the geographic medium in and through which a remarkably diverse range of human and non-human communities swirled and overlapped to create a fascinating, if understudied, narrative of the Civil War.

Tragedy, Affect and Labor in American Literature, 1945–2020
  • Kate Montague
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • This book is a politically urgent and critically rigorous study of the re-emergence of tragedy in American literature since 1945. It argues that literature appeals to tragic forms and figures to narrate the lived experience of labor during a period of social upheaval. In the novels of William Gaddis, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Philip Roth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the generic coordinates of tragedy attach to the precarious work-lives of multiple characters in ways that bring labor into direct conversation with a literary history of tragedy. It explores Faustian pacts in The Recognitions (1955) and the inescapable determinism of The Bell Jar (1963), through the sacrificial scapegoat and singing choruses of Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the Oedipal reckoning of Blood and Guts in Highschool (1984), to the Shakespearean bloodlines of The Human Stain (2000) and the tragic forms of alienation in Americanah (2013).

The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Cold War
  • Edited by Art Redding
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • This Companion explores the relationship between American literature and the Cold War. It shows how American writers offered critical depictions of social conformism amid the Cold War drive for consensus and McCarthyite persecution during the Eisenhower years. From the formal experiments of Beat and Black Mountain writers and the countercultural politics of the New Left to the postmodernism of the Reagan era, literature oscillated between tropes of 'freedom,' aligned with the Western geopolitical imagination, and 'constraint,' associated with supposedly totalitarian communist regimes. Writers also confronted the threats of nuclear annihilation, environmental crisis, and US imperial overreach. Influenced by the Civil Rights movement, marginalized communities developed literary practices that articulated resistance and demands for liberation, often in solidarity with global anti-colonial struggles. Work associated with second-wave feminism, the Black Arts Movement, American Indian and Chicano/a renaissances, and gay and lesbian movements challenged both the ideological certainties and representational conventions of the liberal status quo.

Original City, Original Sin
  • King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida
  • Martin Dobrow
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    15 October 2026
  • A Klan rally where four Black men were almost burned alive. A hotel manager pouring acid into a pool to chase out Black swimmers. Brutal assaults of peaceful demonstrators at the site of a former slave market downtown. A shooting into the cottage rented for Martin Luther King, Jr. Each form part of a rarely told and riveting story of civil rights in the nation's oldest city, St. Augustine, Florida. At the height of his fame, King found his treasured doctrine of nonviolence challenged as never before-all as the fate of the Civil Rights Act, the most consequential legislation of the twentieth century, hung in the balance. In this intimate exploration based on hundreds of interviews, Martin Dobrow introduces an extraordinary collection of idealists-Black and white, young and old, gay and straight-who were drawn into the movement, putting their lives on the line for racial justice.

Democracy Speaks
  • School Boards, Public Discourse, and the Fight to Be Heard
  • Jonathan E. Collins
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • School board meetings have become the battleground for some of the most contentious political battles in the United States, but their importance extends beyond current hot-button issues. In Democracy Speaks, Jonathan E. Collins offers a groundbreaking exploration of how local school boards shape public voice, democratic accountability, and educational equity. Collins presents the importance of public discourse at school board meetings as central to effective school board governance, and more broadly shows how everyday civic spaces like school board meetings can either deepen or erode trust in government. The book also develops a new theoretical lens for thinking about democratic accountability in this setting - 'deliberative culture' - to trace how discursive norms can result in impactful school reform. At a time when public education is caught in political crossfire, this book offers a hopeful, research-driven framework for reimagining school governance as a site of meaningful public engagement.

The Psychopath and the Twentieth-Century American Novel
  • Frederick Whiting
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • The Psychopath and the Twentieth-Century American Novel examines the psychopath as a new kind of monster. Frederick Whiting reads novels – ranging from pulp fiction to belles lettres – that draw on science, law, and popular journalism to try to explain this threatening new creature. Through these readings, this book uncovers the ways in which the figure of the psychopath that populated so many twentieth-century American novels expressed cultural anxieties about sexuality, race, gender, and class – even as the psychopath marked the shifting boundaries of the category of 'the human.' Whiting offers an interdisciplinary analysis showing how literature, science, law, and popular journalism inform each other. Ultimately, he concludes, this episode in the genealogy of monstrosity amounts to a transformation in the evolving concept of the monstrous itself – from a violation of our nature to a violation of our narratives.

A Queer Guide to Saving American Democracy
  • R. K. Maril
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    15 October 2026
  • Since the early 2000s, American courts and legislatures have delivered a series of generation-defining LGBTQ legal victories. Today, this progress and the very institutions that made it possible are under attack. A Queer Guide to Saving American Democracy is an introduction to this democratic crisis, speaking directly to the queer and transgender people navigating the intensifying political and cultural fault lines. It argues that the current denigration of queer and transgender lives in the US is a symptom of the broader degradation of American democracy, representing the newest threat of American fascism. By centering queer and trans identity in the larger history of authoritarianism, the book highlights the strategic villainization of nonconforming groups as a tool to consolidate power and political control. In response, this book empowers readers to adopt pro-democracy frameworks rooted in the defiant authenticity and stubborn joy of queer existence, forging pathways committed to transformative social change.

White Knuckling
  • Holding On in America's Racialized Political Economy
  • Tess Wise
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • In White Knuckling, Tess Wise combines political economy, political development, and ethnography to develop a theory of systemic racism as a political process. Using a Racialized Political Economy (RPE) lens, she links institutions, material conditions, culture, and contestation to demonstrate how systemic racism both benefits and harms white middle-class families. Drawing on interviews with families and bankruptcy court records, she follows individuals under economic strain and experiencing 'white knuckling' as they work through debt to explore how financialization turns hardship into revenue. She reveals that the promised rehabilitation often fails, operating as hidden public-private welfare that can preserve some assets while entrenching precarity. Tracing scripts of deservingness and responsibility, Wise demonstrates how racism in political economy helps and hurts white middle-class Americans, blinding them to their racial privilege and undermining the mechanisms that would lead to race and class solidarity.

Energy and Economy in American Literature
  • Alan Ackerman
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • This ambitious history of industrial and cultural revolution illuminates the formation of a new idiom of energy and economy in nineteenth-century America. In 1851, Ralph Waldo Emerson made an arduous journey to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, in a series of lectures, he articulated modern ideas of industrial power, the soul's economy, and a value system premised on a new set of prime movers, fossil fuels. Emerson asked a practical question: 'How shall I live?' His response was to create a mythic language centered on the energy-and-economy dialectic. This book vividly shows how other authors, from Catharine Beecher, who laid the groundwork for the environmental canon, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who poeticized labor, to Henry Adams and Edith Wharton, as well as conservationists, homemakers, and coal miners, built on Emerson's 'practical question' to give fresh purpose to human existence in a radically altered world.

Page 1 of 2674