NBN Book of the Day

Julia Azari, Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, has a new, award-winning[*] book centering on the connection between race and the American presidency, specifically in the reaction to presidents who made progress on the issue of race in the United States. Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History focuses on four different periods in American political history and a number of different presidential administrations including: Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump. Race and the American presidency are not usually topics that are looped together, and this is also part of the point that Azari is making in the book, since presidents often try to elide racial politics and policy issues. Race is also not usually connected to presidential impeachments, but this is yet another key point that Azari raises, connecting racial progress, the backlash responses, and the subsequent impeachments. In noting these connections, Azari threads examples over time where presidents directly confronted race in American politics, working towards more racial equality, and how these efforts also prompt a backlash response. The key case studies in Backlash Presidents are Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War in the 1860s, Lyndon Johnson’s efforts in the 1960s in regard to the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, as well as anti-poverty legislation, and finally Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States, which was both symbolic and structural. Backlash Presidents traces not only the progress made during these administrations, but also the responses that followed in the subsequent administrations. It is these next administrations, of Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump, where each of these presidents were either impeached or were about to be impeached, and how this dynamic pulls together a variety of different threads to help us to understand presidential politics, institutional development, and American political history all in context of the question of race.

Azari’s research is connected to the idea of political time, but with the important addition of pulling out the problem of race in the United States. Backlash Presidents contributes to our thinking about not only the time and context of presidents and their administrations, but also to thinking about what it is that presidents do to politics itself. Part of this analysis also interrogates populism, positioning these movements within the context of racial backlash, while also building out the understanding of the president’s position within his own party, especially during these fraught periods. In each of the key examples, Azari highlights the ways in which Johnson, Nixon, and Trump were outsiders to what was going on inside their parties—in each case the Republican Party at the time—and how these shifting partisan foundations opened up different kinds of vulnerabilities for these presidents.

In each of the case studies, there is also the discussion of the role that the U.S. Congress plays, since they are the actors who move towards impeaching and trying the president. Members of the House of Representatives need to move beyond constraints in order to impeach a president, and in these instances, they have concluded that the president is not correct in some basic and meaningful way, that the president is not upholding his oath of office, and is also undermining the forward movement on race and racial equality.

Backlash Presidents: From Transformation to Reactionary Leaders in American History is a deeply researched analysis, with important historical context and details to help flesh out the particular time period under consideration. The examination is further complicated and built out with important understandings of party politics in the United States, and how president fits into their political party, or may be seen as an outsider. Racial dynamics in the United States undergirds the entire theory, and helps us see the tensions within partisan politics, presidential politics, and American democracy.

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

[*] The Presidents and Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association awarded Backlash Presidents the 2025 Richard E. Neustadt Best Book Award, given for the best book on executive politics published during the year.
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In 1905, when Broadway was already the most famous thoroughfare in
New York City, a recreational photographer from Newark, New Jersey named
Charles Gilbert Hine set out to document the street’s entire length.

Taking
pictures from downtown Bowling Green and its skyscrapers to uptown
Inwood with its fields and wildflowers, Hine depicted a Broadway
animated by the presence of the past and the relentless pressures of
change.

Through his lens appear shanties, brownstones and country houses;
horse-drawn wagons and trolley cars; downtown sex workers and uptown
famers.

Hines’ photographs lingered in the collection of the New York
Historical until they were discovered by Nick Yablon, a professor of
history and American Studies at the University of Iowa.

Now they appear in Nick’s new book, From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: C.G. Hine’s 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway (Columbia University Press, 2026).

Combining
Hines’ photographs with his own analysis, along with maps and other
images, Nick has produced an illuminating book that depicts Broadway,
its peoples, its buildings, and the many neighborhoods that Broadway
traverses, at a distinct moment in time.

A digital companion to From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower, with a selection of Hine’s photographs, an interactive map of Broadway, and more, can be found here.
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Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. R. Joseph Parrott
explores how anti-colonial movements in Angola, Mozambique, and
Guinea-Bissau reshaped US activist engagement with the Global South from
the 1960s through the 1970s and influenced American foreign policy as
the Vietnam War drew to a close. These Portuguese African liberation
movements, led by nationalists like Eduardo Mondlane and Amílcar Cabral,
built global solidarity networks to support their military and social
challenges to empire while defending against Western intervention. US
activists disillusioned with the Cold War came to see African
self-determination as central to global campaigns for racial and
economic justice. A broad coalition ranging from Black Power radicals to
religious liberals mobilized against the North Atlantic alliance with
Portugal. In the process, this grassroots movement helped define a New
Left Internationalism that championed decentralized, multiracial
organizing and a collaborative vision of US foreign policy to redress
historic inequalities between Global North and South.

Drawing
on more than fifty oral histories and research in government and
activist archives on three continents in English, Portuguese, French,
and Afrikaans, Dr. Parrott reconstructs the transnational anti-imperial
network that injected Global South priorities into US political debates.
Popular protests and informational campaigns led to collaborations with
legislators eager to constrain the powerful executive branch. In 1976,
this grassroots-legislative alliance halted Gerald Ford’s anti-communist
intervention against the Soviet-backed government of newly independent
Angola. This victory of New Left Internationalist ideas anticipated
future anti-apartheid and Latin American peace movements while also
fueling
a conservative revival of Cold War containment. By exploring US
engagement with the contested process of African decolonization, Dream the Size of Freedom
highlights the origins of two contrasting visions of American foreign
policy that defined debates over the country’s proper role in the Global
South into the 1990s.

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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Sentient Seas: Archaeologies of Seascapes and Maritime Rituals (UP Florida, 2026), published by University Press of Florida (2026), offers a global perspective on maritime cultures, examining how societies across time and space have understood and interacted with the sea. Synthesizing archaeological evidence, historical documents, and ethnographic accounts, Ian McNiven explores maritime traditions from ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mediterranean to medieval Europe and Scandinavia to contemporary Indigenous communities in the South Pacific.

McNiven investigates diverse cultural practices including shipbuilding, the treatment of shipwrecks and shipwreck victims, and maritime resource use, interpreting the evidence through the perspectives of mariners who understood the seas to be sentient and capable of acting with intentionality. He introduces the concepts of “terrestrial seascapes” and “ontological switching” to illustrate how land-based shrines and votive offerings extend maritime cosmologies and maintain a liminal transition from land to sea. By bridging anthropological and archaeological research with transdisciplinary blue humanities scholarship, Sentient Seas approaches seas as spiritscapes, recontextualizing folkloric beliefs about maritime superstitions.

Ian J. McNiven is Research Professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator with the Australian research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea.
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An unsettling exploration of the persistence of racism in reproductive healthcare in the US—and why even affluent Black women are imperiled by substandard care.From a leading expert on race, class, maternal health, and reproductive rights.Racism in maternal healthcare is not reserved for the poor. An unsparing picture of inequities in prenatal care and childbirth in the United States, Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans (MIT Press, 2026) reveals that not only are black people three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause, but racial disparities in maternal mortality persist across income levels. That is, wealthier black people are much more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period than their white counterparts. Focusing on a San Francisco obstetrics clinic that caters to the affluent, Khiara Bridges looks at the choices around prenatal care and childbirth that class-privileged, pregnant black people are making in order to survive what has been called the “black maternal health crisis.”Bridges, whose previous work exposed how race and racism are embedded in maternal healthcare for the poor, draws on two years of participant-observation to show how wealthier black people try to leverage their class privilege to avoid some of the negative effects of their blackness—only to discover that in a country that has never reckoned with its horrific racial past, there is no escaping racism’s reach. Throughout the book, engaging, heartbreaking, infuriating stories of women’s experiences with pregnancy and prenatal care illustrate how race and racism matter regardless of wealth or status.
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