100 Books Like Fighting for American Manhood

Men, did you know that too little body hair or too much talkativeness could keep you from being admitted to the United States in the early 1900s? The Straight State will have readers shaking their heads at the outrageous presumptions that immigration inspectors applied to keep “degenerates” out of the country. This was the first time that federal officials had both the interest and power to create policies against homosexuality, and they were crassly influenced by the eugenics movement and hostility to the poor. Canaday also shows how early welfare policies perpetuated gender stereotypes and discrimination against sexual “deviants,” favoring the married over the single. I learned so much! 

I’ll probably still be citing this book when they drag me into professorial retirement, yelling, “Did you know that popular representations of Israel as a hypermasculine superman helped justify the U.S.-Israeli alliance, particularly after 1967?!” “Obviously,” my colleagues will yell back, “that’s only one of the reasons why we are still assigning this book, even during the great 2051 AI-Robot rebellion!”

McAlister’s Epic Encounters came out around 2001 as many Americans were wondering, “Why do they hate us?” The ones that did not grab the Qur’an (wrong era, peeps!) or rightwing polemics, grabbed this excellent history of U.S. interests in the Middle East. McAlister interprets that word, “interests,” broadly, offering a holistic account of how Americans – not just diplomats – have imagined Southwest Asia and North Africa throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

This book contains significant touchpoints, from 1950s Biblical Epics to Black Power’s connections with… show more.

This is another book that personally enlightened me to the core of my sister’s prosecution: misogyny. Before reading Kate Manne’s book, I had a broad and incomplete understanding of “misogyny,” despite it affecting every aspect of our society.

After reading this book—and understanding that misogyny is the way that women are controlled and punished in a patriarchal system—I couldn’t unsee the evidence of misogyny all around me. We cannot challenge gender-based violence without first understanding its fundamental building blocks.

“Where are the women?” So goes this 1989 classic’s opening gambit.

We think politics is the domain of men, Enloe points out, but women have long been out there doing vital and often invisible work, whether as diplomats’ wives, sex workers recruited around US army bases, farmers, or labor leaders.

Bringing this gendered labor to the forefront of international relations is Enloe’s strength. She discusses how images of women “work,” as in the Chiquita Banana ads that introduced American housewives to this unusual fruit and helped expand United Fruit’s bloody empire, but also studies women’s transnational labor organizing.

Reading this book in graduate school guaranteed I would never think of those little stickers on bananas in the same way. Like many other historians of US foreign policy, I still assign sections from Enloe regularly, particularly in my “Transnational America” class. 

Pettegrew, a historian, also portrays Roosevelt as brute-in-chief at the turn of the 20th century, but he zooms out and describes other social forces in the United States that contributed to the emergence of the militaristic definition of manhood. These include the mythologizing of the Civil War as a noble display of male honor, divorcing the war from its roots in slavery and mistreatment of Blacks. He shows how the advocates for stronger men—and dependent women—“self-consciously used Darwinian biology to classify brutishness as an essential and natural male trait.” The book provides a fascinating and comprehensive look at the complicated ways in which gender stereotypes have been created and perpetuated in America.

Naoko Shibusawa’s modern classic addresses a historical puzzle with huge repercussions: how did Americans go from viewing Japanese people as irredeemable enemies, to the point of justifying nuclear warfare and internment camps during World War II, to constructing them as vulnerable, willing, and dependable allies soon after Japan’s surrender?

Theories about “maturity” at the intersection of race and gender provide the answer. Despite its title, this book says little about the historical figure of the geisha – except in its use in postwar American cartoons that reimagined Japan as a compliant ward.

This monograph remains a huge inspiration for my work—I just love how deftly Shibusawa connects culture and politics. 

In the opening salvo of the second wave feminist movement in the West, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir memorably argued that men's gender often goes unnoticed, as if manhood were simply the neutral human condition.

Dean's book counters this common blind spot by demonstrating how the supposedly neutral categories of manhood, class privilege, and whiteness have significantly shaped US foreign policy. Specifically, he examines how a homogeneous group of upper-class white men led to disastrous US policy decisions in Vietnam.

These policymakers, raised in exclusive boarding schools, men's clubs, and military hierarchies that excluded women and people of color, used gendered and sexualized metaphors to justify policies that contradicted their claims to rational pragmatism. They also orchestrated the "lavender scare"—purging non-heterosexual Americans from government during McCarthyism.

This book reminds me that every analysis of US foreign policy should pay attention to who is making the decisions. Positionality matters.

I’ve read, taught, and loved Stephen Crane’s stories for years. Harried out of the United States because of “immoral” behavior, Crane moved to England, where he died from tuberculosis at the age of 29.  Henry James wept when he heard of Crane’s death.

The Open Boat is based on an actual event. On his way to Cuba as a correspondent during the Spanish-American war, Crane and three companions spent thirty hours in a small dinghy after their ship sank, with only three surviving the ordeal.

Crane transforms these circumstances into a great short story. In a tone at times whimsical, ironic, and meditative, the Correspondent, the only character whose consciousness we enter, arrives at a double awareness.

He learns that nature is “flatly indifferent” to his plight—and, amazingly, that “the subtle brotherhood of men” established in the dinghy offers more-than-adequate compensation for that bleak realization.

Many books have been written about TR’s time in the Rough Riders, including his 1899 version (I have an original), but Risen’s is perhaps the best. He provides context by delving into the Spanish occupation of Cuba and why it motivated so many young Americans to take up arms to free its people.

Foremost among them was 39-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, a family man with a safe government job willing to risk it all in combat. They had only three weeks of training before shipping out, and their logistical support was nightmarish. They didn’t even have enough food while on the march to San Juan Heights, and mosquitoes felled as many men as Spanish bullets, yet TR and the Rough Riders charged into history. I felt as if I was charging right along with them.

When I read this book as a student, I knew exactly the kind of book I would want to write if I ever got the chance—a book that would bring people of the past to life as Edmund Morris had with T.R. The author first imagined the work as a screenplay, and it shows on every page.

The chapters unfold like scenes in a great, ambitious movie. Roosevelt is set free from his cartoonish reputation and emerges as a complex, brilliant, protean figure, fascinating in each stage of his extraordinary life.