Episodios

  • Jake Johnson, "The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

    Jake Johnson, "The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
    Jul 7 2024
    Las Vegas is a place the American dream made; a city built in the middle of desert visited by millions of people every year hoping to make their dreams (big or small) come true. The essays in The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas (University of Illinois Press, 2023) examines Las Vegas not as a kitschy, vaguely embarrassing American tourist destination, but rather takes seriously the performers and audiences who have made Las Vegas the embodiment of American mythology. In this interview, the volume's editor, Jake Johnson, is joined by two contributors: Brian F. Wright, author of “Elvis in Vegas: The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and the City of Second Chances” and Joanna Dee Dass co-author with Maddie House-Tuck of “The Real Deal: Impersonation and the American Dream in Branson and Vegas.” The Possibility Machine is a large collection of essays that examines music and performance in Las Vegas from multiple perspectives and considers the city’s history from mob-dominated playground to a family-friendly tourist destination. The essays explore music as an important facet of the lives of the city's residents, its promise of second chances to performers, the allure of its spectacle to audiences, and the circulation of its reputation around the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west
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    58 m
  • Sigrid Schönfelder, "'Gold Fever' and Women: Transformations in Lives, Health Care and Medicine in the 19th Century American West" (Transcript, 2023)

    Sigrid Schönfelder, "'Gold Fever' and Women: Transformations in Lives, Health Care and Medicine in the 19th Century American West" (Transcript, 2023)
    Jul 3 2024
    Throughout its history, the American West symbolized a place of hope and new beginnings, where anything was possible, especially for men. However, the history written until the 1970s and 1980s excluded women. In 'Gold Fever' and Women: Transformations in Lives, Health Care and Medicine in the 19th Century American West (Transcript, 2023), Sigrid Schönfelder illustrates how the American West served as a catalytic gold mine for many transformations for women. It draws on the life narratives of three healthcare providers whose devotion within the social reform movements of the long nineteenth century contributed significantly to shaping healthcare policies. Their stories show how women contributed to place-making in the West and served as role models for other women to enter the field of medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west
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    45 m
  • Felicia Arriaga, "Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America" (UNC Press, 2023)

    Felicia Arriaga, "Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America" (UNC Press, 2023)
    Jun 30 2024
    In recent years, dozens of counties in North Carolina have partnered with federal law enforcement in the criminalization of immigration--what many have dubbed "crimmigration." Southern border enforcement still monopolizes the national immigration debate, but immigration enforcement has become common within the United States as well. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations are a major part of American immigration enforcement, Felicia Arriaga maintains that ICE relies on an already well-established system--the use of local law enforcement and local governments to identify, incarcerate, and deport undocumented immigrants. In Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America (UNC Press, 2023), Arriaga contends that the long-term partnership between local sheriffs and immigration law enforcement in places like North Carolina has created a form of racialized social control of the Latinx community. Arriaga uses data from five county sheriff's offices and their governing bodies to trace the creation and subsequent normalization of ICE and local law enforcement partnerships. Arriaga argues that the methods used by these partnerships to control immigration are employed throughout the United States, but they have been particularly visible in North Carolina, where the Latinx population increased by 111 percent between 2000 and 2010. Arriaga's evidence also reveals how Latinx communities are resisting and adapting to these systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west
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    1 h y 3 m
  • David H. Wilson, "Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

    David H. Wilson, "Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
    Jun 29 2024
    Between the mid-19th century and the start of the twentieth century, the Northern Paiute people of the Great Basin went from a self-sufficient tribe well-adapted to living on the harsh desert homelands, to a people singled out by the Native activist Henry Roe Cloud for their dire social and economic position. The story of how this happened is told in Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country (Bison Books, 2022) by David H. Wilson, Jr. By focusing on the human stories that make up the arc of nineteenth century Paiute history, Wilson argues that many historians have gotten the Paiute story wrong, and that greater attention needs to be paid to Native sources, rather than taking the words of American generals at face value. Through characters like O.O. Howard, Sarah Winnemucca, and James Wilbur, Wilson tells the epic story of adaptability and change, even in the face of great tragedy, that sets the Paiute's apart as a singular part of American Western history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west
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    1 h y 2 m
  • Elsa Devienne, "Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Elsa Devienne, "Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Jun 23 2024
    The Los Angeles shoreline is one of the most iconic natural landscapes in the United States, if not the world. The vast shores of Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu are familiar sights to film and television audiences, conveying images of pristine sand, carefree fun, and glamorous physiques. Yet, in the early twentieth century Angelenos routinely lamented the city's crowded, polluted, and eroded sands, many of which were private and thus inaccessible to the public. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, LA's engineers, city officials, urban planners, and business elite worked together to transform the relatively untouched beaches into modern playgrounds for the white middle class. They cleaned up and enlarged the beaches--up to three times their original size--and destroyed old piers and barracks to make room for brand-new accommodations, parking lots, and freeways. The members of this powerful "beach lobby" reinvented the beach experience for the suburban age, effectively preventing a much-feared "white flight" from the coast. In doing so, they established Southern California as the national reference point for shoreline planning and coastal access. As they opened up vast public spaces for many Angelenos to express themselves, show off their bodies, and forge alternative communities, they made clear that certain groups of beachgoers, including African Americans, gay men and women, and bodybuilders, were no longer welcome. Despite their artificial origins, LA's beaches have proved remarkably resilient. The drastic human interventions into nature brought social and economic benefits to the region without long-term detrimental consequences on the environment. Yet the ongoing climate crisis and rapid sea level rise will eventually force the city to reckon with its past building. Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Oxford UP, 2024) not only uncovers how the Los Angeles coastline was constructed but also how this major planning and engineering project affected the lives of ordinary city-dwellers and attracted many Americans to move to Southern California. Featuring a foreword by Jenny Price, it recounts the formidable beach modernization campaign that transformed Los Angeles into one of the world's greatest coastal metropolises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west
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    43 m
  • Kathleen DuVal, "Native Nations: A Millennium in North America" (Random House, 2024)

    Kathleen DuVal, "Native Nations: A Millennium in North America" (Random House, 2024)
    Jun 20 2024
    In this sweeping new history, esteemed University of North Carolina historian Kathleen DuVal makes the case for the ongoing, ancient, and dynamic history of Native nationhood as a critical component of global history. In Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024), DuVal covers a thousand years of continental history, building on a new generation of scholars who have argued for the continued power and agency of Native people in the face of challenges, obstacles, and catastrophes. DuVal's history begins long before any European knew of continents across the Atlantic Ocean, and tracks the history of Native nationhood as an idea and practice up through the present day. Incorporating the use of of environmental history, global history, archaeology and oral history, among other diverse methods, DuVal presents a rich and complex history of a continent that has a history dating back far longer than many people might assume, and tells a story that, rather than a simple narrative of decline and conquest, is more intereseting and far more complex. It is impossible to come away from this book without believing that the story of Native nationhood is indeed, the story of North America itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west
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    58 m
  • Alex V. Barnard, "Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness" (Columbia UP, 2023)

    Alex V. Barnard, "Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness" (Columbia UP, 2023)
    Jun 18 2024
    Is involuntary psychiatric treatment the solution to the intertwined crises of untreated mental illness, homelessness, and addiction? In recent years, politicians and advocates have sought to expand the use of conservatorships, a legal tool used to force someone deemed “gravely disabled,” or unable to meet their needs for food, clothing, or shelter as a result of mental illness, to take medication and be placed in a locked facility. At the same time, civil liberties and disability rights groups have seized on cases like that of Britney Spears to argue that conservatorships are inherently abusive. Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness (Columbia UP, 2023) is an incisive and compelling portrait of the functioning—and failings—of California’s conservatorship system. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with professionals, policy makers, families, and conservatees, Alex V. Barnard takes readers to the streets where police encounter homeless people in crisis, the locked wards where people receiving treatment are confined, and the courtrooms where judges decide on conservatorship petitions. As he shows, California’s state government has abdicated authority over this system, leaving the question of who receives compassionate care and who faces coercion dependent on the financial incentives of for-profit facilities, the constraints of underresourced clinicians, and the desperate struggles of families to obtain treatment for their loved ones. This book offers a timely warning: reforms to expand conservatorship will lead to more coercion but little transformative care until government assumes accountability for ensuring the health and dignity of its most vulnerable citizens. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west
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    1 h
  • Timothy G. Anderson and Brian Schoen, "Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond" (Ohio UP, 2023)

    Timothy G. Anderson and Brian Schoen, "Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond" (Ohio UP, 2023)
    Jun 17 2024
    Scholars working in archaeology, education, history, geography, and politics tell a nuanced story about the people and dynamics that reshaped this region and determined who would control it. The Ohio Valley possesses some of the most resource-rich terrain in the world. Its settlement by humans was thus consequential not only for shaping the geographic and cultural landscape of the region but also for forming the United States and the future of world history. Settling Ohio begins with an overview of the first people who inhabited the region, who built civilizations that moved massive amounts of earth and left an archaeological record that drew the interest of subsequent settlers and continues to intrigue scholars. It highlights how, in the eighteenth century, Native Americans who migrated from the East and North interacted with Europeans to develop impressive trading networks and how they navigated complicated wars and sought to preserve national identities in the face of violent attempts to remove them from their lands. Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond (Ohio UP, 2023) situates the traditional story of Ohio settlement, including the Northwest Ordinance, the dealings of the Ohio Company of Associates, and early road building, into a far richer story of contested spaces, competing visions of nationhood, and complicated relations with Indian peoples. By so doing, the contributors provide valuable new insights into how chaotic and contingent early national politics and frontier development truly were. Chapters highlighting the role of apple-growing culture, education, African American settlers, and the diverse migration flows into Ohio from the East and Europe further demonstrate the complex multiethnic composition of Ohio’s early settlements and the tensions that resulted. A final theme of this volume is the desirability of working to recover the often-forgotten history of non-White peoples displaced by the processes of settler colonialism that has been, until recently, undervalued in the scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west
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    36 m