New Books in Urban Studies

How the urban-rural divide drives partisan polarization Why have Americans living in different places come to experience politics as a battle between “us” and “them”? In Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy (Princeton UP, 2025) Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that political polarization is not just about red states and blue states, or coastal elites who alienate those in fly-over country. Instead, polarization permeates every region and every state—and has become organized through a pernicious rural-urban division. Mettler and Brown explain the evolution of this gulf across five decades, charting political trends in both places. Drawing on data on individuals, communities, and members of Congress, as well as interviews with local party leaders and former elected officials, they show how the divide emerged and why it poses a threat to democracy. Until about thirty years ago, both political parties attracted support from rural and urban voters. But after place-based inequality grew due to deregulation and trade liberalization, white rural dwellers began to view urban people and Democrats as affluent elites out of touch with their needs. Politically active evangelical churches, antiabortion organizations, and gun groups helped deepen the divide, encouraging many of these rural residents to become staunch supporters of the GOP. Now, regional one-party rule in rural America gives Republicans a systematic edge for gaining control of crucial political institutions, including the Senate, House of Representatives, the Presidency, and even the Supreme Court. This is helping enable an extremist political party and pushing democracy to the brink. Mettler and Brown argue that the divide can be repaired—but only if the Democrats build their own robust local organizations and offer citizens a meaningful choice.

Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she specialises in the study of public policymaking and litigation in the US. A former British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, she is the author of the award-winning book,America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Trevor Brown is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. In Fall 2026, he will join the University of Oregon's Department of Political Science as Assistant Professor of Inequality.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The notion of abolishing prisons strikes some as an impossible dream: could we could reasonably conceive of a society that responded to harm without the possibility of long-term confinement in purpose-built institutions? To others, we already have a template. Didn’t Michel Foucault long ago show us that prisons as they exist now–in all their horror, in all their commitment not just to jail people before trial but also to imprison them afterwards–come about only in the modern episteme, concomitant with capitalism and all sorts of attendant evils?

Actually, nope. Prisons are as old as the Romans and very likely much older than that. In Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (California, 2025). Mark Letteney (a U Washington historian who wrote The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity)directs excavations in a legionary amphitheater) and Matthew Larsen (University of Copenhagen, author of Gospels before the Book) document an ancient and durable prison system system with five key features: Centrality, surveillance, separation depth, and punitive variability.

Their RTB conversation explores key aspects of that system and its present-day legacy or parallels. Yet it ends on a note of cautious optimism from Letteney: just because we don’t find a prison-free world in ancient Rome is no reason to give up the struggle. Whatever better solution to societal safety and rehabilitation awaits us in the future, it must be something we ourselves set out to build anew.

Mentioned

Michel Foucault’s foundational Discipline and Punish (1975)

Adam Gopknik reviews Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration in The New Yorker

The Rules of Ulpian (3rd century jurist)

Wengrow and Graeber’s foundational and heavily debated The Dawn of Everything (2021)

Spencer Weinreich’s work on solitary confinement)

Erving Goffman Stigma (1963) and Asylums (1961)

Livy (eg in his History of Rome on prisons and prisoners

Who  Would Believe a Prisoner? Edited by Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Angeline Nelson

Libanius (on the abuse of Prisoners)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The House of the Dead

Samuel Delany Tales of Neveryon
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the annexation of the princely state of Hyderabad in September 1948 to the formation of Andhra Pradesh in 1956 and the eventual creation of Telangana in 2014--these broad brushstrokes of Hyderabad's history are well-documented. What has long been missing, however, is the perspective of the people, the different communities who lived through these upheavals--the communal violence of Independence and Partition, the push for a linguistic re-imagination of the state and its bifurcation, the long-drawn-out struggle for statehood--and those who were forced to adapt to a rapidly changing India. For the first time, Daneesh Majid brings their stories to light. Drawing from generational interviews, oral histories, literature in Urdu and English and his own personal experiences, he drafts a modern history of Hyderabad in The Hyderabadis: From 1947 to the Present Day (Harper Collins, 2025). A work of this scale and size has never been attempted before and The Hyderabadis promises to open new doors to the former kingdom's past and future.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) offers a new look at over a century of Yiddish culture in New York City. Author Henry H. Sapoznik focuses on theater, music, architecture, crime, Black-Jewish cultural interactions, restaurants, real estate, and journalism to tell the history of New York’s Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles of the period, and thanks to new research from previously inaccessible materials, the book reveals fresh insights into the influence of Yiddish culture on New York City and showcases the culture’s persistent

Join YIVO for a discussion with Sapoznik about this new book, led by Eddy Portnoy.

This discussion originally took place on October 23, 2025.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the heart of the modern world lie ventilation shafts. We may not notice them, but wherever there are tunnels, sewers, mines, car parks and energy stations under our feet, vents will be doing vital work keeping them cool and fume-free.

Vents come in a wonderful and inventive variety of forms. Adventurous Vents: A Journey through the Ventilation Shafts of Britain (Penguin, 2025) by Lucy Lavers, Judy Ovens, Suzanna Prizeman celebrates them both in their own right as intriguing individual structures, and as an innovative way to tell the story of Britain's subterranean industrial development from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Here are one hundred of the most interesting ventilation shafts, dotted around Britain, sometimes in the most surprising places. You'll find them masquerading as sculptures and small buildings, adorned with fine details or displaying their purpose with confidence.

Whether you're inspired to take off in search of them, or just to admire them from your armchair, vents are fabulous objects. By putting them – perhaps for the very first time – centre-stage,

Adventurous Vents celebrates a highly unusual but exciting architectural form.

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