New Books Network

It’s the Pop Culture Professors, and we conclude our analysis of season 5 of For All Mankind with a discussion of the finale, “This Land Is Our Land.”
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Henry Ford did not just mass produce cars. As a member of the Episcopal
Church, reader of New Thought texts, believer in the “gospel of
reincarnation,” mass marketer of antisemitic material, and employer who
institutionalized a social gospel, Henry Ford’s contributions to
American models of business were informed by and produced for an America he understood to be broadly Christian. Though Ford’s efforts at the
head of the Ford Motor Company have commonly been understood as secular, Ford himself was explicit that his work in engineering and auto
production was prophetic and meant to remake the world.

In Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America (NYU Press, 2025), Dr. Kati Curts presents a religious history of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company repositions them within critical studies of religion, examining how Ford transformed American religious practice in the twentieth century. Drawing directly on documents from Ford’s archive, it examines Ford’s mass production methods and
bureaucratic reforms as examples of prosperity gospel traditions,
illuminating the ways manufacturing and technology intersect with
American religious practice. Bridging American religious and industrial
history, Assembling Religion offers a new and surprising way to understand Ford’s impact on culture, commerce, and the technology of labor.

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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The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. It’s a word that Elizabeth Pryor has not only contemplated, it’s one that she has taught and observed up close.When a white student quoted her father and blurted out the N-word in the middle of a class she was teaching, Professor Pryor’s worlds collided. In that moment, she was forced to confront the history of the notorious slur in the United States, and her complicated relationship with her father Richard Pryor, who made the word a trademark of his comedy in the 1970s.As she dives into her research, her own memories of the N-word come flooding back in unprocessed memories that she hadn’t thought about for decades. In reckoning with those memories, Elizabeth goes on a more public journey of discovery of the messy and sometimes surprising legacies of racism in the United States.A braided narrative that seamlessly integrates the history of the N-word with Elizabeth’s own story of growing up the Black Jewish daughter of Richard Pryor, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word and Me (37 Ink, 2026) follows Elizabeth as she becomes a leading scholar and teacher of the very word her father put on the pop culture map.

You can find Elizabeth on her website, Instagram, and TikTok. Her viral Ted talk, “Why it’s so hard to talk about the N-word,” is here. And Richard Pryor: Live in Concern (1979) can be streamed on YouTube. 

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.
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It’s 1940 and Gaby’s parents and sister succumb to Typhus after staying in France to care for Gaby and Sabine’s dying grandmother. The war is in full swing and Gaby can’t get home to Poughkeepsie, NY. Her aunt lives in Ireland, which stayed neutral during WWII, so she heads there. But the aunt has just died, and 18-year-old Gaby makes her way to the remote manor of her aunt’s husband’s relatives, where she’s hired as a servant. In a different reality, 17-year-old Sabine is the sister who survived. She also finds her way to Ireland, but Germany has invaded, so she’s in hiding. Then Sabine gets to the same remote manor where for one hour at dusk, a mystical time according to Irish legend, she and Gaby meet and talk. We Meet Apart (Regal House Publishing, 2026) is about family, resilience, and survival in the face of war, death, and the world of ghosts.

Martha Conway grew up in northern Ohio and earned her B.A. in English and History from Vassar College. She received a master’s in English: Creative Writing, from San Francisco State University. Her previous novels include The Underground River, which was a New York Times Book Editor’s Choice, and Thieving Forest, which won the North American Book Award for Historical Fiction. Her short fiction has been published in The Iowa Review, Carolina Quarterly, Missouri Review, Folio, and other journals. She is a recipient of a California Arts Council fellowship, and she teaches creative writing for Stanford University’s Writing Certificate program. When Martha is not writing or reading, she's playing at being a flaneuse—a city stroller—or traveling to Italy to see Roman ruins with her husband, a former archeologist.
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The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment have often been claimed
for sociology. But, what does it mean to say these thinkers were
sociologists, or at the very least precursors to the subject? Does it,
for example, mean that intellectuals of 18th Century Scotland
had the same concerns as we do today? Alternatively, does it mean we
should think of sociology as an elite discipline, developed by men who
were attached to power, albeit with some often critical insights? In
turn, if we accept these thinkers as doing something distinct, how can
this sociologically be explained? These are the questions which animate
Alex Law’s The Roots of Sociology: Scottish Enlightenment and the Civilising Process (Routledge, 2026). Structured around two sections, Sociology and the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as Sociology of the
Scottish Enlightenment, Law sees these thinkers as thinking through
what Elias would later call the civilising process. He so doing he
explores how questions of state formation, violence and emerging
commercial society structured their interest and how the particular
position of Scotland, a stateless nation experiencing rebellion,
provided the space for what he calls their ‘pre-sociology’.

In our podcast we discuss how Law’s attempt to see the Scottish
Enlightenment thinks as concerned with the civilising process differs
from other attempts to claim them for sociology, the legacy of the Act
of Union for these writers and how one became a thinker in these times.
We also discuss why Adam Smith is, for Law, an ‘ambivalent’ figure for
sociology and what we can learn from these writers about the scope and
historical insight sociology should have.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts.
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