New Books in the American South

Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice (Temple University Press, 2026) investigates
how communities in Central Valley, California deal with Valley Fever, a
painful illness caused by a soil fungus. The airborne disease’s
symptoms can last from two months to a patient’s lifetime and may be
fatal. Nearly a
third of the national cases are reported in California, where those
infected are disproportionately farmworkers and people incarcerated in
the region. Poverty, pollution, and prison expose these groups to
cumulative environmental and health risks that deny Valley Fever
patients adequate medical treatment.

Dr.
Sarah M. Rios examines how these populations face racial health
disparities and develop strategies of care. She connects environmental
justice activists as well as prison advocates and abolitionists who
mobilize protests and issue calls to action to the past and ongoing
efforts for medical autonomy and healthy communities. Diseases Have No Eyes emphasizes that vulnerable groups have developed an expertise
and understanding of Valley Fever out of necessity. In the process,
these community members offer an alternative public health response that
extends beyond the individual body.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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Fort
Bend County, Texas, looks like the America we claim to want: a suburb
where Black, White, Asian, and Latinx families share cul-de-sacs,
schools, and celebrations. Residents trade dishes, honor
one another's traditions, and take pride in their community's
diversity. Yet beneath this harmony lies what sociologist Dr. Kiara
Wyndham calls "the diversity contract"—an unspoken agreement that racial
diversity may be celebrated, but racial inequality must not be named. 

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and more than 150 interviews, Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb
(University of California Press, 2026) reveals how the language of
inclusion can obscure enduring racial hierarchy. In Fort Bend and
communities like it, White advantage adapts to diversity rather than
disappearing. Vivid and deeply researched, Diversityland
transforms how we understand suburban life and challenges foundational
narratives of what racial progress will look like in 21st century
America.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Amidst heightened rhetoric and increasing polarization in the United States, American Pogroms: How Forgotten Massacres Shape America (Oxford University Press, 2026) chronicles the causes and consequences of two centuries of mob violence in American history, highlighting exactly what's at stake when we allow leaders to legitimate violence and the mob to rule.

For much of American history, members of the majority population of the United States indiscriminately attacked and terrorized minority communities. In some parts of the country, mob violence seemed a near-constant part of the region's history, while in others it was a brief, horrific spasm that perpetrators--but not victims--quickly forgot.

In American Pogroms, terrorism expert Daniel Byman argues that there is a word for this type of communal violence: pogrom. Although pogroms are historically associated with the orchestrated campaigns of anti-Jewish violence in Tsarist Russia, Byman asserts that pogroms have been an all-too-frequent feature of American history. Tracing two centuries of communal violence, Byman recounts cases of attacks against American religious minorities such as Catholics and Mormons, the killing of thousands of ethnic Mexicans in Texas, the murder and wholesale expulsion of Chinese workers from the American West, and the repeated attacks on the Black community that killed thousands and enabled decades of brutal discrimination. In all these cases, pogroms helped cement a system of injustice that left religious, ethnic, and racial minorities politically and economically marginalized. While the idea of mob violence now strikes most Americans as unthinkable, Byman warns that increased polarization and selective news consumption in recent years has coarsened discourse and legitimized violence, raising the risk that at least some violence will return.

A broad-ranging synthesis of how and why majorities have so frequently resorted to community-level violence to restore or cement their power, American Pogroms illustrates the outsized role of violence in U.S. history and how it shapes the country today.

Daniel Byman is a Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures.

Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by
centering Tuskegee’svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the
diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee’s methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

In
contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and
premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and
practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture.
Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically
Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps
Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very
soil.

Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.
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Dr. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel’s Seeking Freedom in Indian Country: Slavery, Sovereignty, and Resistance within the Five Tribes, 1790–1861 (LSU Press, 2026) is the first comprehensive study of African chattel
slavery within the Five Tribes: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw,
Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations. Dr. Oertel examines how chattel
slavery functioned among all Five Tribes before and during the removal
process, how the tribes reconstituted slavery post-removal in Indian
Territory, and how enslaved Black people promoted freedom-seeking
strategies at each stage. Furthermore, her work considers how the
conflict over slavery in Indian Territory contributed to the larger
national debate over slavery’s fate on the eve of the Civil War.

Historians
have examined how the practice of African enslavement emerged within
one or two tribes, how forced migration affected slavery within
particular nations,
and how the debate over slavery divided multiple Indigenous nations.
Dr. Oertel, however, is the first to examine Indian Territory as a
whole, its significance to the sectional debates, and its role as an
incubator of emancipation policies in the United States. Knitting
together these individual tribal narratives and supplementing them with
extensive primary research on how slavery functioned across Indian
Territory, she integrates Indian country into the antebellum march
toward the Civil War.

Seeking Freedom in Indian Country
joins a rising chorus of studies that integrate southern and western
history, which, by default, also pulls together the history of the
so-called Indian Wars with the Civil War. Dr. Oertel suggests that we
cannot fully understand the causes of the Civil War without also
considering the changes brought about by the forced removal of Indians.
She argues that settler colonialism and the expansion of African chattel
slavery together set the stage for sectional conflict to explode in the
West. Ironically, both Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism and
Black resistance to slavery challenged white supremacy in ways that
foretold the end of slavery but also furthered the settler colonial
project.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south