New Books In American Studies

“It’s a free country.” Many of us recall saying that as children as we learned that we were American citizens who were endowed with certain rights—such as free speech. We would use those words when we wanted to assert our own rights when we were being bullied or chastised. We would use them to let others know that even if we did not agree with what they were saying or doing, they were within their rights to express certain opinions or to do certain things. How many American adults feel as confident now about expressing our views in public settings as we did when we were children or young adults? In his authoritative but general-reader-friendly new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage legal scholar and public intellectual Jonathan Turley argues that many Americans nowadays are “speech phobic” and employ terms such as “hate speech” to shut down legitimate discussion of such topics as immigration, government policies during the height of the Covid pandemic and transgenderism. He maintains