Episodes

  • Ryan Tan Wander, "Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West" (Texas Tech UP, 2024)

    Ryan Tan Wander, "Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West" (Texas Tech UP, 2024)
    Jan 23 2025
    In today’s cultural and political climate of relative LGBTQ+ inclusion, Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West (Texas Tech University Press, 2024) by Dr. Ryan Tan Wander provides a literary history that rewrites our understanding of when and how queerness began to align with US nationalism and settler colonialism, tracing the discursive production of masculinities in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literatures of the American West. Current scholarly understandings often equate turn-of-the-century representations of the US frontier with hypermasculinity and heteronormativity. Simultaneously, scholars tend to view queer inclusion—that is, the civil and political inclusion of those who make up the “-Q+” of the initialism LGBTQ+—as a phenomenon of post–Civil Rights era activism. Settler Tenses provides a deeper history of queerness in US history by showing that literature created frontier masculinities that representationally yoked a range of queer bodies and subjectivities to national identity as the US consolidated its sovereignty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reframing and explaining anew the provenance and significance of the links between queerness and US nationalism and settler colonialism, Settler Tenses will appeal to an audience of advanced undergraduates as well as researchers and scholars in American literary studies, gender, queer, and sexuality studies, settler colonial studies, and critical race and ethnic studies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. 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 hr and 10 mins
  • James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024)

    James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024)
    Jan 18 2025
    California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry (University of Texas Press, 2024) examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian Dr. James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional “city.” This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region’s rich natural environment. Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources—including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs—to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites—a “City of Wood”—Dr. Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. 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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    46 mins
  • Victor M. Valle, "The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands" (U New Mexico Press, 2023)

    Victor M. Valle, "The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands" (U New Mexico Press, 2023)
    Jan 17 2025
    Chile is more than just spice, writes Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Cal Poly Ethnic Studies professor Victor Valle in The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands (U New Mexico Press, 2023). By tracing the meaning of chile as a plant and chile eating as an act. Valle shows how Indigenous cultivation and culinary practices troubled colonizers, sustained cultures, and fostered exchange. The Poetics of Fire calls for decolonization of chile cultivation and a renewed embrace of Indigenous ideals toward land and nourishment, arguing that chiles serve as a connection point between pre-colonization Indigenous societies and twentieth century (and beyond) Chicanx and Latinx communities. At once food studies, Indigenous studies, and Latinx studies, The Poetics of Fire dispenses with Scoville units and instead thinks about how chile is a window for understanding a decolonized world. 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 hr and 21 mins
  • Robert Wright, "Indigenous Autonomy at La Junta de Los Rios: Traders, Allies, and Migrants on New Spain's Northern Frontier" (Texas Tech UP, 2023)

    Robert Wright, "Indigenous Autonomy at La Junta de Los Rios: Traders, Allies, and Migrants on New Spain's Northern Frontier" (Texas Tech UP, 2023)
    Jan 12 2025
    Today I talked to Robert Wright about Indigenous Autonomy at La Junta de Los Rios: Traders, Allies, and Migrants on New Spain's Northern Frontier (Texas Tech UP, 2023). The Indigenous nations of the valley of the Rio Grande that is now centered upon Ojinaga, Chihuahua, and Presidio, Texas―the La Junta valley in colonial times―had a long and unique history with Hispanics during the colonial period. Their valley was the initial route to New Mexico and West Texas explored by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s. In the mid-1600s, the Juntans began engaging in long-distance migrant labor in Nueva Vizcaya, and in the 1680s they began inviting Franciscan missionaries and serving as important military allies to Hispanic troops. Yet for seventy-five years only the missionaries, without any Hispanic military or civilians, lived among them, due to both the remoteness of their valley from Hispanic settlements and the Juntans' insistence upon their autonomy. This is unique in Spanish colonial annals on the northern frontier of New Spain. This detailed research study adds much new information and many corrections to the rare previous studies. 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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    51 mins
  • Adrian de Leon, "Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America" (UNC Press, 2023)

    Adrian de Leon, "Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America" (UNC Press, 2023)
    Jan 11 2025
    In a book that pulls together both sides of the Pacific, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (UNC Press, 2023) asks the question: what if we look at Filipino history not from the cities or the imperial metropoles, but from the mountains and the countryside? Or put another way, from the "bundok," the Tagalog word for "mountain" which American soliders in the late 19th century would come to use as a catachall for the places they found themselves fighting imperial wars. In Bundok, NYU history and FIlipino Studies professor Adrian De Leon tracks both the movement of European and American colonizers into the archipeligo, as well as how people and images moved beyond the islands and into the wider Pacific world, and how these pictures and these emigres shaped ideas about civilization, savagery, and the nature of Filipine identity itself. In a book that traces pathways from the mountains of Luzon to the mountains of South Dakota, De Leon demonstrates how the American West has always been a transnational space. 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 hr and 16 mins
  • Farina King, "Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century" (UP of Kansas, 2023)

    Farina King, "Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century" (UP of Kansas, 2023)
    Dec 26 2024
    In this deeply personal account, University of Oklahoma associate professor of Native American Studies Dr. Farina King describes the history and present of Diné dóó Gáamalii, Navajo people who, in her words, "walk a Latter-day Saints pathway." The book, Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century (UP of Kansas, 2023), uses her family's history of life in the LDS church to explore the complicated and very human relationships Diné people have with so-called Mormonism. Refusing to be defined by easy stereotypes, King's account shows people coming to the church and remaining in the church for deeply personal and deeply felt reasons, often in the face of prejudice both from within and without wider Indigenous communities. Diné dóó Gáamalii is the story of complex religious life in the American West, and a history of acceptance being found sometimes where it might be least expected. 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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    55 mins
  • Linda M. Clemmons, "Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876" (SDHS Press, 2023)

    Linda M. Clemmons, "Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876" (SDHS Press, 2023)
    Dec 22 2024
    For much of her life, Angelique Renville had decisions made for her. Where to live, who to live with, where to attend school, what to do with her land. That changed in 1863 when she made a plan and successfully hatched her plan to escape, living the end of her life on her own terms. This is the story Dr. Linda Clemmons tells in Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876 (South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2023). Hers is a story, yes, of defeat and loss, but also so much more than that. Of a young woman carving her own path through a world in flux, and finding space to make choices even when those choices are limited. And it's a story with afterlives, as the web of connections created by Renville during her life continued even after her untimely death in 1876. As a work of biography, Unrepentant Dakota Woman does not pretend to speak for all Dakota women, or even all 19th century Dakota women born into fur trade families, but does show how one life can both embody the historical forces that shape our stories, and how our choices can overcome even the strongest headwinds. 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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    57 mins
  • Scott Huver, "Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210" (Post Hill Press, 2024)

    Scott Huver, "Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210" (Post Hill Press, 2024)
    Dec 22 2024
    Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210 (Post Hill Press, 2024) explores the city’s true crime history, delving deep inside cases that made headlines, scandals that engulfed Hollywood legends, and more strange-but-true tales that could only happen in the 90210. Beverly Hills Noir chronicles an assortment of jaw-dropping true crime stories spanning the legendary city’s history, each with oh-so-90210 twists—including a high-profile murder mystery in the city’s most extravagant mansion, the daring exploits of a handsome cat burglar with movie star looks, a toxic Tinseltown love triangle that ended in gunplay, a brazen Rodeo Drive jewelry store holdup with tragically stunning finale, an Oscar nominated actress on shoplifting spree and more—complete with major roles and countless cameos by Hollywood idols and cultural icons. A gripping, century-long tour of the glamorous city’s shadowy underbelly through crimes and misdemeanors as over-the-top as the city itself, Beverly Hills Noir collects the kinds of stories you’d expect to be swapped if James Ellroy and Dominick Dunne had met Jackie Collins and Ryan Murphy for cocktails at the Polo Lounge. It’s Sunset Boulevard and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood turned sordid, face-down-in-the-pool reality. Scott Huver has covered the inner workings of Beverly Hills, the entertainment industry, and the Los Angeles-area elite for three decades. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. 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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    53 mins