New Books Network

Media Rurality (Duke UP, 2026), edited by Darin Barney and Patrick Brodie, investigates the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings alike. Edited by Darin Barney and Patrick Brodie, from the boglands of Ireland to data centers in the Oregon countryside to the homemade media systems of rural Tanzania, the contributors to this volume show how rural territories are highly mediated, technologized spaces profoundly enmeshed with global capitalism and colonialism. Approaching the study of rurality through a materialist lens that foregrounds infrastructure, this collection shows how rural spaces often bear the environmental brunt of capitalist development while being relegated to the economic and cultural periphery.Contributors: Christopher Ali, Patrick Bresnihan, Patrick Brodie, Darin Barney, Jenna Burrell, Jordan B. Kinder, Burç Köstem, Cindy Lin, Emily Ng, Lisa Parks, Anne Pasek, Esther Peeren, Nicole Starosielski, Ishita Tiwary, Hunter Vaughan, Ayesha Vemuri, Megan Wiessner, Assatu Wisseh. 

This episode features a conversation with host Sadie Couture, editors Patrick Brodie and Darin Barney, and contributors Burç Köstem and  Megan Wiessner. 

Sadie Couture is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University, and an incoming Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. https://www.sadiecouture.com/
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Contentious Citizenship: Salvadoran Activism and Belonging Across Borders (U Arizona Press, 2026) reshapes how we understand belonging, identity, and political participation in the context of migration. Drawing on decades of Salvadoran activism from the 1980s solidarity movement to the post–civil war era, Arely M. Zimmerman offers a powerful ethnographic account of how migrants challenge exclusionary state practices and redefine citizenship on their own terms using transnational networks and revolutionary politics that transcend borders.Drawing on nearly fifty interviews with activists who fled El Salvador, Zimmerman traces how political refugees carried with them strategies of resistance and community organizing that shaped social justice movements in the United States. The book addresses the political turmoil and grassroots mobilizations in El Salvador, the sanctuary movement of the 1980s, contemporary activism, and the impact of women’s strategies and forms of resistance.Essential reading for scholars and students of migration, Central American studies, and political movements, Contentious Citizenship is a bold intervention into contemporary debates on identity, legality, and resistance. Zimmerman’s work honors the ingenuity and resilience of Salvadoran activists and invites readers to consider what it means to belong.

This interview was conducted by Mary Reynolds, publicity manager for the University of Arizona Press. Her book, The Quake That Drained the Desert (forthcoming in 2026) investigates the 1887 borderlands earthquake that changed surface water and groundwater in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.
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Nicholas Tochka analyzes the role of rock music in the life of Charles Manson, the Family, and the August 1969 Tate-LaBianca killings, which also gives larger insight into Sixties counterculture.

Failed singer-songwriter. Devious cult leader. A rock Pied Piper. The product of a sick society. Just another dime-a-dozen singing hippy mystic. Did the guitar-playing guru personify the violence that the rock counterculture inflicted on America? Or did his music diagnose the dehumanizing effects of that society's broken institutions?

For over five decades, commentators have debated the meaning of Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca killings. Rock music links their narratives: from the acid drenched singalongs at the Spahn Movie Ranch, to a bizarre theology centered on Beatles songs, to his commune's alleged links with Hollywood's elite, to an album, LIE: The Love and Terror Cult (1970). In this first comprehensive examination of the Manson Family's music, Nicholas Tochka writes with, against, and alongside the many authors-true-crime hacks, gonzo journalists, conspiracy theorists, and rock critics alike-who have told and retold the story of "the Manson murders." Playing the truth games that these postwar Americans helped invent, The Musical Lives of Charles Manson: The Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Invention of the Sixties (Bloomsbury, 2026) presents a new take on the story of the commune-and on rock's role in fracturing the possibility of writing trustworthy histories after the Sixties.

"They are afraid of it, because it tells the truth," Manson once claimed, describing his music. Just what truths did the Manson Family's music-making tell?

Nicholas Tochka is Associate Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and the author of several books including Rocking In the Free World: Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America and Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania. His work examines the politics of music-making in the postwar world.

Nicholas on the University of Melbourne’s website.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.

Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.
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Byline for the Dead: A Novel of Labor, Conspiracy, a Bloody Uprising and Two Ambitious Journalists (Sager Group, 2025) is a historical mystery-thriller that interweaves stories from different eras as two journalists, five decades apart, work to unravel the truths about one of the most violent labor strikes in American history. In 1984, Gray Wheeler is a disillusioned young reporter working for The Toledo Sword. Assigned to cover the 50th anniversary of the Auto-Lite strike-known as the "Battle of Toledo," a bloody, five-day labor uprising involving 10,000 union workers and 1,300 Ohio National Guard troops-Gray stumbles across a mystery left unpublished a half-century earlier by another young reporter that connects the 1934 massacre to present-day political machinations. Putting together the pieces, past and present, the two reporters work in tandem across the decades, unravelling the corruption that led to the deadly strike. As the story proceeds, we learn of desperate workers, soulless political agitators, ruthless National Guard troops, suppressed government reports, buried testimonies, and suspicious deaths. As Gray and newspaper librarian Kirby Peters dig deeper into the story, they discover the chilling truths behind the spark that ignited the bloodshed. And they find their lives at risk. The deeper they dig, the greater the danger. Threats culminate in a deadly confrontation in the ruins of the old Auto-Lite factory. Byline for the Dead explores themes of journalistic integrity, institutional memory, and the power of the past to shape the present. As Gray confronts Toledo's forgotten history and the ghost of his own unfulfilled ambitions, he must decide whether exposing the truth is worth the cost-especially when the truth fights back.

Ray Welling, PhD, grew up in Toledo, Ohio and earned a journalism degree at Northwestern University in Chicago. Later, he migrated to Australia, where he has worked as a journalist, editor, publisher, content director, writer, marketing manager, lecturer and podcaster. He lives in Sydney with his wife. Byline for the Dead is his first novel and was a finalist for the 2025 American Writing Awards for Best New Debut Fiction.
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A rich history of cross-racial coalitions and alliances of the Sixties' freedom movement, acclaimed historian Alice Echols's Black Power, White Heat reshapes our understanding of the entire era.

One of the most divisive issues in recent progressive politics has been what role, if any, allies might legitimately play in other people's movements. Despite the significance of this debate, it has taken place in a historical vacuum.In Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic, (Oxford UP, 2026) the Sixties historian Alice Echols explores what happened some sixty years ago when whites and Blacks came together in the fight against racism. She tells this story by focusing on two Black-led organizations that bookend the Sixties: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party. In SNCC, whites were, in part, meant to generate a "white heat" so searing it would accelerate change. Results were mixed, and white activists formed new movements, from women's liberation to draft resistance.By 1967, the Black Panther Party was advancing its own unique brand of "revolutionary nationalism," and seeking out white supporters. Partnering with whites brought the group visibility and resources, but it also put the Panthers at odds with other Black radicals, with unfortunate consequences.Black Power, White Heat explains how solidarity lost credibility, and not just from within the movement. Here, the FBI played a key role, and so did the discourse of "radical chic," advanced most effectively by the journalist Tom Wolfe. Still, even as Black-white solidarity lost steam, it was not entirely played out. In some of the era's most important political trials, even courtrooms became sites of solidarity as predominantly white juries returned verdicts that suggested they trusted Black Panther defendants more than the District Attorneys prosecuting them. Clear-eyed about the difficulties of solidarity, Black Power, White Heat nonetheless emphasizes the achievements and considerable promise of uniting across difference, and in ways that will inform and deepen current debates roiling progressive politics.

Alice Echols is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. She is the author of numerous books, including Daring to Be Bad, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here
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