Help Support the NBN on Patreon | Visit New Books Network en Español!

New Books Network

About Andrew Epstein

NBN Episodes hosted by Andrew:

Native American Studies April 26, 2016

Informed Power

Communication in the Early American South

Alejandra Dubcovsky

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard University Press, 2016) maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring how people in the …
Native American Studies November 10, 2015

Peacemakers

The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794

Michael L. Oberg

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
On November 11, 2015, leaders and citizens of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy--Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and Tuscarora--will gather in the small lakeside city of Canandaigua, New …
Native American Studies October 22, 2015

The White Possessive

Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty

Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
Owning property. Being property. Becoming propertyless. These are three themes of white possession that structure Aileen Moreton-Robinson's brilliant new inquiry into the dynamics of race and Indigeneity in "postcolonizing" societies …
Native American Studies August 17, 2015

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
When Howard Zinn published A People's History of the United States in 1980, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was thrilled. "I used it as a text immediately," she remembers. Comrades in the movement …
Native American Studies May 18, 2015

Native American Whalemen and the World

Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race

Nancy Shoemaker

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
For as long as Herman Melville's Moby Dick has been a staple of the American literary canon, one element often goes unnoticed. The ship commanded by the monomanacial Ahab on …
Native American Studies April 26, 2015

Power Lines

Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest

Andrew Needham

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called "Cursed by Coal." The images and stories confirm the title. "Seems like everything's just dying out here," …
Native American Studies March 5, 2015

A Generation Removed

The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World

Margaret D. Jacobs

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
In 2012, a young Cherokee girl named Veronica became famous. The widespread and often coercive adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by non-Native families has long been known, discussed, and …
Native American Studies December 9, 2014

Remembering the Modoc War

Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence

Boyd Cothran

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
If George Armstrong Custer had kept off of Greasy Grass that June day in 1875, Vine Deloria, Jr.'s manifesto might well have been called "Canby Died For Your Sins." The …
Native American Studies October 21, 2014

West of the Revolution

An Uncommon History of 1776

Claudio Saunt

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
Few years in U.S. history call to mind such immediate stock images as 1776. Powdered wigs. Founding fathers. Red coats. And if asked to place this assembly of objects and …
Native American Studies August 21, 2014

Settler Common Sense

Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance

Mark Rifkin

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
In Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Mark Rifkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and incoming president …
Native American Studies June 3, 2014

The Red Atlantic

American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927

Jace Weaver

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
For all the incisive work published in Native American and Indigenous studies over the past decades, troubling historical myths still circulate in both academic and popular discourse. One of the …
Native American Studies November 23, 2013

Native American DNA

Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science

Kim TallBear

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there's ample evidence it might just be. And among the most …
Native American Studies October 1, 2013

In Search of First Contact

The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery

Annette Kolodny

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
We all know the song. "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue..." And now, thankfully, we all know the controversy; celebrating a perpetrator of genocide might say a few unpleasant …
Native American Studies September 2, 2013

Mark My Words

Native Women Mapping Our Nations

Mishuana Goeman

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
The maps drawn up by early settlers to plot their inexorable expansion were not the first representations of North American space. Colonialism does not simply impose a new reality, after …
Native American Studies July 8, 2013

The Seeds We Planted

Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School

Noelani Goodyear-Kapua

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
"School was a place that devalued who we are as Indigenous people," says Noelani Goodyear-Kapua. These were institutions -- at least since white settlers deposed the Indigenous government in the …
Native American Studies May 13, 2013

Domestic Subjects

Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature

Beth H. Piatote

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
The suspension of the so-called "Indian Wars" did not signal colonialism's end, only a different battlefield. "The calvary man was supplanted--or, rather, supplemented--by the field matron, the Hotchkiss by the …
Native American Studies April 1, 2013

On Records

Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory

Andrew Newman

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
Can the spoken word be a reliable record of past events? For many Native people, the answer is unequivocally affirmative. Histories of family, tribe, and nation, narratives of origin and …
Native American Studies February 4, 2013

This Indian Country

American Indian Activists and the Place They Made

Frederick E. Hoxie

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
Deploying hashtags and hunger strikes, flash mobs and vigils, the Idle No More movement of First Nation peoples in Canada is reaching a global audience. While new technology and political …
Native American Studies January 10, 2013

The Indian Great Awakening

Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America

Linford Fisher

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
Just east of the Norwich-New London Turnpike in Uncasville, Connecticut, stands the Mohegan Congregational Church. By most accounts, it's little different than the thousands of white-steepled structures dotting the New …
Native American Studies December 13, 2012

Crooked Paths to Allotment

The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after Civil War

Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
Despite what you may have learned in undergraduate surveys or high school textbooks, the nineteenth century was not one long and inexorable march toward Indian dispossession -- the real story …
Native American Studies November 20, 2012

Decolonizing Museums

Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums

Amy Lonetree

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
"Museums can be very painful sites for Native peoples," writes Amy Lonetree, associate professor of history at UC-Santa Cruz and a citizen of the Ho Chunk Nation, "as they are …
Native American Studies September 9, 2012

Murder State

California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873

Brendan C. Lindsay

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
Brendan C. Lindsay's impressive if deeply troubling new book centers on two concepts long considered anathema: democracy and genocide. One is an ideal of self-government, the other history's most unspeakable …
Native American Studies June 20, 2012

Reimagining Indian Country

Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

Nicolas Rosenthal

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
The term "Indian Country" evokes multiple themes. Encompassing legal, geographic, and ideological dimensions, "Indian Country" is commonly understood to be a space outside of or surrounded by the boundaries of …
Native American Studies May 23, 2012

The Only One Living to Tell

The Autobiography of a Yavapai Indian

Gregory McNamee

Hosted by Andrew Epstein
Late in 1872, as the United States sought to clear the newly incorporated Southwest of its indigenous inhabitants, a company under Capt. James Burns came upon an encampment of Kwevkepayas …