NBN Book of the Day

Political Scientists Christopher Federico, Stanley Feldman, and Christopher Weber have an important and fascinating new book from Oxford University Press focusing on understanding authoritarianism, especially in the American context. As experts in political psychology, the authors are keen to consider authoritarianism as a psychological concept, which is more about submitting to authority, as a kind of conformity, and less about a particular political regime structure. The Authoritarian Divide: Partisan Identity, Voting, and the Transformation of the American Electorate (Oxford UP, 2026) is about trying to understand voters and how some of them are attracted to this idea or concept, and how this attraction then works itself out within the electorate and within our contemporary political moment.

In order to understand this theory of psychological authoritarianism, the authors trace the idea from origins in critical theory and pre-World War I European thinkers (Freud, Benjamin, etc.) who were examining the concepts of conformity vs. autonomy, and how these ideas functioned in political life. The authors also examined differing approaches to child-rearing, since this also reflects these same concepts of conformity and autonomy, but in how they are put into practice in bringing up children, either with more freedom or in a more rules bound approach. In using these measures, Federico, Feldman, and Weber also pulled together data from election surveys starting in the 1990s and moving forward that include questions that get at some of the same ideas. The authors also used experiments to test individual inclinations towards autonomy or uniformity. The thrust of voter’s choices was not about economics or specific public policy in these analyses, but around social issue differentiation and social context. The research for The Authoritarian Divide is complex and brings together a variety of different methodological approaches in order to examine this political divide, and to tease out the impact of psychological authoritarianism in American politics.

The Authoritarian Divide: Partisan Identity, Voting, and the Transformation of the American Electorate reveals that this inclination towards psychological authoritarianism is much more prevalent among white conservative voters than among other voting blocs in the United States. This has also led voters to sort themselves within the two parties accordingly, with far more of those who are inclined towards psychological authoritarianism moving into the Republican Party, and fewer moving into the Democratic Party. The result of this sorting has contributed to the rise in polarization within American politics over the past thirty years.

The Authoritarian Divide explains a lot about voter thinking and approaches to American politics over the past three decades. It helps to decipher the entrenched polarization because the examination is not about policy distinctions or issues, it is about how individual voters think and why they are inclined to think in particular ways about politics. The authors clearly assess the distinctions within the voting populace of the United States, and, in so doing, unpack different approaches to voting and vote choices in different sectors of the electorate. The Authoritarian Divide really helps us to understand our current political climate and to see how the rise of Donald Trump fits into a temporally longer era of American politics, partisan politics, racial politics, and the tensions between democracy and authoritarianism.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
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Ella Jenkins (1924–2024) was one of the most influential musicians of
the twentieth century, although many people have never heard of her. A
pioneer in children’s music and an innovative educator, Jenkins recorded
forty albums and influenced countless children and adults over a
sixty-year career. Gayle Wald places Jenkins’s life and work within the
larger contexts of the civil rights movement, the folk revival, and the
changing worlds of children’s education and entertainment in This is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement (University
of Chicago Press, 2025). Committed to civil rights, Jenkins infused her
beliefs in social justice and our shared humanity into her work with
children and her compositions. She viewed music as a way for children to
come together and establish connections with each other rather than as a
gateway to musical achievement or literacy. Based on dozens of
interviews including with Jenkins and her life partner Bernadelle
Richter, Wald traces Jenkins’s life from her childhood in segregated
Chicago, her involvement with the integrated folk music scene, and her
successful career as a music educator. This is Rhythm was given special recognition by the 2026 Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award.
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Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination
(MIT Press, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies
classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about
advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech,
military weaponry, and surveillance culture. Technothriller is
about the changing imagination of technology within an American context
and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of
modern life.

Soraya Murray
is a Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores the visual
culture of innovation, advanced computation, and its imaginaries as
imaged in popular American films, for which technology assumes a central
role. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback 2021), examines popular video games like Assassin’s Creed, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Theft Auto as visual culture. She currently serves as Provost of Porter College, UCSC.
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For
more than 10,000 years, cats have prowled at the edges of human life.
But, starting only a few decades ago, hundreds of millions of them
became pets. In Cats: A History
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Rod Phillips shares a
sweeping cultural and social history of felines, tracing their shifting
place across societies and centuries, from ancient Egypt's revered
hunters to Europe's suspected familiars of witches and from shipboard
rodent controllers to cherished internet icons.

Professor
Phillips illustrates how cats have always occupied spaces both familiar
and mysterious and how their perceived independence and disruptive
nature—and their associations with women, the supernatural, and
outsiders—have shaped humans' attitudes toward these fascinating
creatures. Cats have been lauded as companions and vermin-killers,
reviled as threats to moral and ecological order, and cherished for the
very qualities that make them hard to control. This richly textured
portrait of cats explores their significance in religion, politics,
gender, literature, warfare, and pop culture. It also provides profound
insights into our relationships with other animals, especially dogs and
rodents.

The many roles that cats have played throughout history
illuminate a variety of contradictions in humans' perceptions of them:
as affectionate yet aloof, adorable
and evil, ordinary and exceptional. This book is the definitive story
of the feline presence in human history—an elegant study of how we live
with animals whom we see as living by their own rules.

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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In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Diana Cucuz about her book, Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR (University of Toronto Press, 2023) and also asks her for advice to beginner scholars studying gender and the Cold War. A bit about Dr. Cucuz’s book: throughout the Cold War, Soviet citizens had limited access to US life and culture. Amerika, a glossy Russian-language magazine similar to Life, provided a rare exception. Produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA), America’s first peacetime propaganda organization, Amerika was used to influence the Soviet public and convince women in particular that an American-style consumer culture and conservative gender norms could better their lives. Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds relies on USIA archives, issues of Amerika, and American women’s magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal to show how, during the postwar period, USIA officials deployed idealized images of American women as happy, fulfilled, and feminine wives, mothers, and homemakers.
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