Podcasts by New Books in British Studies
Interviews with Scholars of Britain about their New Books
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Further podcasts by Marshall Poe
Podcast on the topic Gesellschaft und Kultur
All episodes
On William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" from 2022-12-19T09:00
William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in history, and Hamlet is his greatest work. In Hamlet, Shakespeare gave us one of the first modern characters in literature. We are invited into the mind...
ListenOn Virginia Woolf’s "Mrs Dalloway" from 2022-12-08T09:00
In the early 20th century, Europe and North America were undergoing a radical transformation. Scientific, technological, and political changes disrupted many traditional forms of life. The growth o...
ListenOn Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" from 2022-12-02T09:00
The Victorian era is known for its class rigidity and moral strictness. In her 1847 novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë gave us a robust, layered character who pushes against cultural norms and fully...
ListenOn George Orwell's "1984" from 2022-11-28T09:00
In 1948, English author George Orwell wrote what would become one of the defining novels of the 20th century, 1984. He was writing in the years following WWII and the beginning of The Cold War. It ...
ListenOn George Eliot's "Middlemarch" from 2022-11-25T09:00
By the time we reach middle age, our lives have taken certain paths. Sometimes these paths are close to what we imagined in our youth. But more often, they’re dramatically different. We come to rea...
ListenOn H. G. Well's "The Time Machine" from 2022-11-15T09:00
When H.G. Wells was growing up in England in the 1860s, science wasn’t part of education or everyday life the way it is now. Even though the 19th century was an era of dramatic technological invent...
ListenOn John Milton's "Paradise Lost" from 2022-11-04T08:00
As a young student at Christ’s College Cambridge, John Milton announced to the world that he was going to write the greatest poem that the world has ever seen. He didn’t want to sit among the epic ...
ListenOn Samuel Smiles' "Self-Help" from 2022-10-26T08:00
Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help isn’t just an advice manual. It represents the invention of a genre, and not a moment too soon. Smiles was writing at a time when work conditions were extremely poor, and p...
ListenOn Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" from 2022-10-14T08:00
Joseph Conrad, who published 20 books and several best-sellers by the time of his death, was also a sailor. Heart of Darkness follows seaman Charles Marlow’s journey down a river in Africa. It is C...
ListenOn Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" from 2022-10-13T08:00
In 1651, the English Civil Wars were ending, and Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan. He used the book to advocate his ideal government: an absolute, monarchical sovereign. He also highlighted the pr...
ListenOn Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" from 2022-10-03T08:00
In the 1770s, the American colonies were working up to a revolution. But while the colonists were increasingly dissatisfied with British rule, there was no general consensus on what to do about it....
ListenOn David Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature" from 2022-09-30T08:00
In 1739, Scottish philosopher David Hume set out to chart the nature and limits of human knowledge. He published his theories and findings in what would become one of philosophy’s most influential ...
ListenOn Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" from 2022-09-28T08:00
Charles Dawin’s 1859 book The Origin of Species introduced his famous theory of evolution. Darwin developed his theories of life and evolution after a historic voyage circumnavigating the globe on ...
ListenOn Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" from 2022-09-20T08:00
When it was first published in 1719, many people believed Robinson Crusoe was a true story. Crusoe provides readers with a close look at not only the isolated human on an individual level, but also...
ListenOn John Maynard Keynes’ "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" from 2022-09-05T08:00
John Keynes’ book, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was published in England at the tail end of the Great Depression. This text is responsible for a massive shift in economic theor...
ListenOn Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" from 2022-08-26T08:00
Edmund Burke was a British government official who saw the French Revolution as a mob action. He wrote a book called Reflections on the Revolution in France. It was published in 1790—one year after...
ListenOn Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" from 2022-08-24T08:00
Frankenstein is a name we all know, even for those who haven’t read Mary Shelley’s novel. But the monster you might imagine is quite different from the one Shelley wrote about in Frankenstein; or, ...
ListenOn T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" from 2022-08-17T08:00
Lawrence of Arabia has become one of the most well known films in the world. It inspired Steven Spielberg to become a filmmaker and President Barack Obama considers it one of his favorite films. Bu...
ListenOn T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" from 2022-08-17T08:00
Lawrence of Arabia has become one of the most well known films in the world. It inspired Steven Spielberg to become a filmmaker and President Barack Obama considers it one of his favorite films. Bu...
ListenOn Thomas of Monmouth's "The Life and Passion of William of Norwich" from 2022-08-03T08:00
There is only one surviving copy of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, but its story continues to haunt us. When 12th-century monk Thomas of Monmouth learned of a young boy’s murder in his...
ListenAndrew T. Fede, "Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and Atlantic World" (U Georgia Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Andrew T. Fede is a lawyer in private practice in northern New Jersey and an adjunct professor of law at Montclair State University. His new book Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves...
ListenPrakash Shah, "Western Foundations of the Caste System" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Indian caste system is an ancient, pervasive institution of social organization within the subcontinent – or is it? Join me as I speak with Dr. Prakash Shah (Reader in Culture and Law at the Qu...
ListenNico Slate, "Lord Cornwallis is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the twenty-first century, India and the United States are two closely connected states. Some of this is economic, and with it comes a concern that jobs in the United States are being outsourced ...
ListenWhitney G. Gamble, "Christ and the Law: Antinomianism at the Westminster Assembly" (Reformation Heritage Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Westminster Assembly (1643-53) was one of the most important ecclesiastical councils in the history of Reformed Protestantism, but until very recently it had received little in the way of schol...
ListenChristine Loh, "Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There can be little doubt that Hong Kong has stood out as a particularly intense East Asian news hotspot in recent years. Whether reports have focused on pro-democracy protests, abducted bookseller...
ListenSusan Carlile, "Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind" (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Though not as well known today as some of her literary contemporaries, Charlotte Lennox wrote numerous works during the mid-18th century that won her critical acclaim and influenced subsequent gene...
ListenFarhana Shaikh, "From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century" (Dahlia Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are the characteristics of the 21st Century arts leader? In From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century (Dahlia Publishing, 2019), Farhana Shaikh, a writer, publisher, and jou...
ListenJacob Johanssen, "Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How can insights from psychoanalysis help us understand digital culture? in Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data (Routledge, 2018), Jacob Johanssen, a senior le...
ListenGeraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of ...
ListenMatthew Bingham, "Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Matthew Bingham, who teaches theology and church history at Oak Hill College, London, has written what must be one of the most startling accounts of religion in mid-seventeenth-century England. His...
ListenJeremy Black, "Britain and Europe: A Short History" (Hurst, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It was a pleasure, earlier today, to speak to Jeremy Black, professor of history at the University of Exeter, about his new book, Britain and Europe: A Short History (Hurst, 2018). Jeremy is one of...
ListenDebra Thompson, "The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Debra Thompson, in her award-winning* book The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explores the complexities of the politics ...
ListenAndrew R. Holmes, "The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism, 1830-1930" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Earlier today I caught up with my colleague at Queen’s University Belfast, Andrew R. Holmes, to discuss his outstanding new book, The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Exp...
ListenSam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, "The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged" (Policy Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who gets in to top professions? In The Class Ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged (Policy Press, 2019), Drs Sam Friedman, an associate professor of sociology at LSE, and Daniel Laurison, an assist...
ListenGeorge R. Boyer, "The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generations. As George R. Boyer details in The Winding R...
ListenPhilip Zelikow and Ernest May, "Suez Deconstructed: An Interactive Study in Crisis, War, and Peacemaking" (Brookings Institution, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Experiencing a major crisis from different viewpoints, step by step: the Suez crisis of 1956— one of the major crises of the 1950s offers a potential master class in statecraft and the politics of...
ListenHidetaka Hirota, "Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Hidetaka Hirota is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Prior to his current position, he was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of ...
ListenMarcia Morgan, "Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender and Race" (Edwin Mellen Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With prison reform a topic of international conversation and debate, Marica Morgan’s Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender and Race offers an in-depth and unique analysis o...
ListenKatie Beswick, "Social Housing In Performance: The English Council Estate On and Off Stage" (Methuen Drama, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How has the council estate been represented on stage? In Social Housing In Performance: The English Council Estate On and Off Stage (Methuen Drama, 2018), Dr. Katie Beswick, a lecturer in drama at...
ListenWilliam Kelso, "Jamestown: The Truth Revealed" (U Virginia Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Jamestown: The Truth Revealed (University of Virginia Press, 2017; paperback, 2018), William Kelso, Emeritus Head Archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, takes us literally to the so...
ListenChristopher Gerrard, "Lost Lives, New Voices: Unlocking the Stories of the Scottish Soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar, 1650" (Oxbow Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In November 2013, two mass burials were discovered unexpectedly on a construction site in the city of Durham in northeast England. Over the next two years, a complex jigsaw of evidence was pieced t...
ListenOnur Ulas Ince, "Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Onur Ulas Ince constructs an important analysis of liberalism, capitalism, and empire in his new book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018). This text ...
ListenJesse A. Zink, "Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan: Civil War, Migration, and the Rise of Dinka Anglicanism" (Baylor UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The most recent addition to Baylor University Press’s Studies in World Christianity is Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan: Civil War, Migration, and the Rise of Dinka Anglicanism (Baylor U...
ListenSuzanne Schneider, "Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The history of Palestine is overly political; most studies, especially of the Mandate period, when the British effectively colonized Palestine, focus on the political actors. In Mandatory Separatio...
ListenVictoria Brownlee, "Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Victoria Brownlee is the author of an exciting new contribution to discussions of early modern religion and literature. Her new book, Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England...
ListenRory Cormac, "Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the decades following the Second World War, the British government increasingly turned to covert operations as a means of achieving their foreign policy goals. In Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Specia...
ListenK. Fullagar and M. A. McDonnell, "Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kate Fullagar's and Michael A. McDonnell's edited volume Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) reimagines the Age of Revolution from the...
ListenSuman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of ra...
ListenPeter Hitchens, "The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion" (I.B. Tauris, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Was World War II really the 'Good War'? In the years since the declaration of peace in 1945 many myths have sprung up around the conflict in the victorious nations, especially the United Kingdom. I...
ListenAndrew Roberts, "Churchill: Walking With Destiny" (Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For all of the books written about Winston Churchill, much remains to be said about his extensive life and career. In Churchill: Walking With Destiny(Viking, 2018), Andrew Roberts takes advantage o...
ListenMcKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...
ListenDiarmaid MacCulloch, "Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life" (Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Despite ranking among the most influential people in English history, Thomas Cromwell has long eluded biographers and historians. In Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (Viking, 2018), though, Di...
ListenRuma Chopra, “Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
After being exiled from their native Jamaica in 1795, the Trelawney Town Maroons endured in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone. In Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nov...
ListenCairns Craig, “The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence” (Edinburgh UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Professor Cairns Craig’s new book, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), which has been shortlisted for the Saltire History Book of the Ye...
ListenMiranda Kaufmann, “Black Tudors: The Untold Story” (Oneworld, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptized in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage ...
ListenDonald H. Akenson, “Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelicalism” (Oxford UP/McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Don Akenson, who is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen’s University, Ontario, is one of the most eminent scholars of Irish history. Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby...
ListenRobert G. Ingram, “Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England” (Manchester UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Robert G. Ingram’s Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press, 2018) radically reinterprets the English Reformation. Subject...
ListenRoland Philipps, “A Spy Named Orphan: the Enigma of Donald Maclean” (W.W. Norton, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Donald Maclean was one of the most treacherous and productive – for Moscow spies of the Cold War era and a key member of the infamous “Cambridge Five” spy ring, yet the complete extent of this shy,...
ListenAudrey J. Horning, "Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic" (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Audrey Horning revisits the fraught connections between Ireland and colonial Virgini...
ListenGill Bennett, “The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still resonates nearly one-hundred years after it was wr...
ListenSujit Sivasundaram, "Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire" (William Collins, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (William Collins, 2020), Sujit Sivasundaram brings together far-flung archives across the world and the best new academic research....
ListenJeffrey Kahan, “Shakespeare and Superheroes” (ARC Humanities Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do Shakespeare and superheroes have in common? A penchant for lycra and capes? A flair for the dramatic? Well, according to Shakespeare scholar, English Professor and comic-book fan Jeffrey Ka...
ListenRichard Muller, "Grace and Freedom: William Perkins and the Early Modern Reformed Understanding of Free Choice and Divine Grace" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
No-one has done more than Richard A. Muller to shape our approach to early modern historical theology. His earlier work, and most especially the four volumes of his Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmat...
ListenNathaniel Philbrick, “In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown” (Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most Americans do not appreciate the extent to which victory in the American Revolution was due to the leadership of a French aristocrat. As Nathaniel Philbrick demonstrates in his new book In the ...
ListenJoanne Paul, "Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While it has often been recognized that counsel formed an essential part of the political discourse in early modern England, the precise role that it occupied in the development of political thinki...
ListenStephanie L. Derrick, “The Fame of C. S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and America” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
C. S. Lewis remains one of the most popular religious writers, and one of the most widely discussed children’s writers. I had the chance to catch up with Stephanie L. Derrick about her new book, Th...
ListenNiklas Frykman, "The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The 1790s were a decade of turmoil and strife across the West. With the French Revolution, a new era of wars began that invoked the language of equal rights. In The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age o...
ListenCharlotte Greenhalgh, “Aging in Twentieth-Century Britain” (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What role did elderly Britons have in shaping the twentieth-century welfare state? In her new book, Aging in Twentieth-Century Britain (University of California Press, 2018), Charlotte Greenhalgh o...
ListenBilly Coleman, "Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
CAN you hear the people sing? Political music is often understood as the property of the common people, used as a potent (and noisy) weapon against the interests of the powerful. This is particular...
ListenB. P. Owensby and R. J. Ross, “Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America” (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York University Press, 2018), edited by Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross, examines the...
ListenCaroline Starkey, "Women in British Buddhism: Commitment, Connection, Community" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Based on detailed ethnographic research, this book explores the varied experiences of women who have converted to Buddhism in contemporary Britain and analyses the implications of their experiences...
ListenStephen R. Platt, “Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age” (Knopf, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The reason for Great Britain’s war against China in the First Opium War (1839-42) is often taken as a given. British merchants wanted to “open” trade beyond the port of Canton (Guangzhou) and conti...
ListenStefanie Hunt-Kennedy, "Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean" (U Illinois Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Long before the English became involved in the African slave trade, they imagined Africans as monstrous and deformed beings. The English drew on pre-existing European ideas about monstrosity and de...
ListenNick Hubble, “The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question” (Edinburgh UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nick Hubble’s The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) is a thrilling, and timely challenge to the orthodoxy that proletarian and high-modernist literatur...
ListenAgnès Delahaye, "Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England" (Brill, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Agnès Delahaye’s new book, Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England (Brill, 2020), is the story of John Winthrop’s tenure as governor of the Massachusetts Bay...
ListenWilliam Anthony Hay, “Lord Liverpool: A Political Life” (Boydell Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If Lord Derby was the ‘forgotten Prime Minister’ and Andrew Bonar-Law was the ‘Unknown Prime Minister’ then Robert Banks Jenkinson (1770-1828), 2nd Earl of Liverpool, who was Britain’s longest serv...
ListenErin A. McCarthy, "Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry and the Reading Public in Early Modern England" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Erin McCarthy, who teaches digital humanities at Newcastle University, Australia, has just published a fabulous new book about the ways in which the printing of poetry impacted upon the reading and...
ListenSir John Elliott, “Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford University, one of the premier historians writing in English on Spanish and European History in the Early Modern period, has ...
ListenChima J. Korieh, "Nigeria and World War II: Colonialism, Empire, and Global Conflict" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Reading the petitions that resident of colonial Nigeria submitted to the government during World War II, Marquette University historian, Prof. Chima J. Korieh found a unique source for African poli...
ListenJeremy Martens, “Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907” (UWA Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907 (UWA Publishing, 2018), Jeremy Martens, a senior lecturer in...
ListenIan Buruma, "The Churchill Complex" (Penguin Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From one of its keenest observers, The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit (Penguin Press) is a brilliant, witty journey through the "Special Rel...
ListenStephen Lee Naish, “Riffs & Meaning: Manic Street Preachers and Know Your Enemy” (Headpress, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Riffs & Meaning: Manic Street Preachers and Know Your Enemy (Headpress, 2018), Stephen Lee Naish tells the story of Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers’ 2001 album Know Your Enemy. The record...
ListenJonathan Schneer, "The Lockhart Plot: Love Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
History in the making can be messy. As a tale told years later by historians, it is usually a clean narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and a mostly logical and foreordained end. Much of that me...
ListenMegan Ward, “Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character” (OSU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Artificial intelligence and Victorian literature: these two notions seem incompatible. AI brings us to the age of information and technology, whereas Victorian literature invites us to the world of...
ListenHayden J. Bellenoit, "The Formation of the Colonial State in India: Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760-1860" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When he appeared before the British House of Commons in the wake of the Stamp Act crisis, Benjamin Franklin reminded his audience that the American colonies were governed ‘at the expense only of a ...
ListenCharles Umney, “Class Matters: Inequality and Exploitation in 21st-Century Britain” (Pluto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is class? In Class Matters: Inequality and Exploitation in 21st-Century Britain (Pluto Press, 2018), Charles Umney, an Associate Professor in Work and Employment Relations at the University of...
ListenM. Sobolewska and R. Ford, "Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are the identity conflicts that define contemporary society? In Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics (Cambridge UP, 2020) Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, pro...
ListenRupali Mishra, “A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Though today the public and private sectors are treated as distinct if not separate, the situation was quite different in early modern England. Back then the two were often intertwined, with one of...
ListenLissette Lopez Szwydky, "Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century" (Ohio State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode of New Books in Literary Studies we speak with Lissette Lopez Szwydky, author of the new book Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio State UP, 2020) A comprehensive s...
ListenJim Clifford, “West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshlands, 1839-1914” (UBC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshlands, 1839-1914 (University of British Columbia Press, 2017), Jim Clifford brings together histori...
ListenMargrit Pernau, "Emotions and Colonial Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her stunning and conceptually adventurous new book Emotions and Colonial Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor (Oxford University Press, 2020), Margrit Pernau examines the varied a...
ListenIrina Dumitrescu, “The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A sharply observed study of the representations of education found in Anglo-Saxon texts, Irina Dumitrescu’s The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press 2018) i...
ListenFrancesca Sobande, "The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain" (Palgrave, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are the possibilities and what are the inequalities of the digital world? In The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave, 2020), Francesca Sobande, a lecturer in Digital Media Studie...
ListenJoanna M. Williams, “Manchester’s Radical Mayor: Abel Heywood, The Man Who Built the Town Hall” (The History Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today, the Neo-Gothic Manchester Town Hall stands as one of the notable architectural features of England’s second city. It also serves, however, as a towering monument to the career of Abel Heywoo...
ListenJames Simpson, "Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Protestant Reformation looms large in our cultural imagination. In the standard telling, it’s the moment the world went modern. Casting off the shackles and superstitions of medieval Catholicis...
ListenDavid Edgerton, “The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History” (Allen Lane, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
David Edgerton’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History (Allen Lane, 2018) argues the United Kingdom had a distinctive national moment characterized by a strong state,...
ListenBernice Lerner, "All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One was a teenage Jewish girl, forcibly transported from her home in Hungary to a Nazi concentration camp. The other was a British doctor, whose experiences serving in two world wars could not comp...
ListenElizabeth M. Sanders, “Genres of Doubt: Science Fiction, Fantasy and the Crisis of Victorian Faith” (McFarland, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Victorians left an indelible stamp on culture that continues to be in evidence today, not least of which is their refinement of the realist fiction medium known as the novel and their innovatio...
ListenStephen Wall, "Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In January 2020, the UK became the first country to leave the European Union after a troubled 47-year membership. What was at the core of the country’s semi-detachment to the EU? Was the UK’s event...
ListenStacey Pierson, “Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her latest book, Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club (Routledge, 2017), Stacey J. Pierson reveals the fascinating history of ...
ListenMatthew S. Hopper, "Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire” (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this wide-ranging history of the African diaspora and slavery in Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Matthew S. Hopper examines the interconnected themes of enslavement, glob...
ListenSteve R. Dunn, “Bayly’s War: The Battle for the Western Approaches in the First World War” (Naval Institute Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Though Great Britain’s warships ruled the waves throughout the First World War, their greatest challenge came from just underneath them. Nowhere was this better demonstrated in the Western Approach...
ListenHarrison Perkins, "Catholicity and the Covenant of Works: James Ussher and the Reformed Tradition" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Historians of early modern religion recognise the importance of the development of covenant theology in the formation of Calvinism. Harrison Perkins, who teaches systematic theology at Edinburgh Th...
ListenMichael Belgrave, “Dancing with the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864–1885” (Auckland UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, Dancing with the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864–1885 (Auckland University Press, 2017), Michael Belgrave, Professor of History at Massey University, tells the st...
ListenThomas Levenson "Money for Nothing" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Modern finance isn't really all that modern. Three centuries ago, Great Britain's need for money to fight its wars, the appearance of joint stock companies, and the emerging quantification of all a...
ListenSimon Kerry, “Lansdowne: The Last Great Whig” (Unicorn Publishing Group, 2018). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Despite having been Foreign Secretary, Secretary of State for War, Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India, Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne is one of th...
ListenIan Kumekawa, "The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics" (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The work of Alfred Charles Pigou may not be as well known to people today as that of his contemporary John Maynard Keynes, but as Ian Kumekawa details in his book The First Serious Optimist: A. C. ...
ListenSumita Mukherjee, “Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks (Oxford University Press, 2018), Sumita Mukherjee highlights the centrality of Indian women in the fight for the v...
ListenStephen C. Kepher, "COSSAC: Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan and the Genesis of Operation OVERLORD" (Naval Institute Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
D-Day, June 6, 1944, looms large in both popular and historical imaginations as the sin qua non, or single defining moment, of the Second World War. Though there were other d-days launched across m...
ListenAdam Kuper, “Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth-Century” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Adam Kuper‘s Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth-Century (Fourth Edition; Routledge, 2014) is an excellent, comprehensive tour through one of the most important an...
ListenD. Benge and N. Pickowicz, "The American Puritans" (Reformation Heritage Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival in the new world of the Mayflower, Dustin Benge and Nate Pickowicz have written a lively and accessible account of America’s earliest English immigr...
ListenLisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the con...
ListenJessica Martell, "Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire" (U Nevada Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Jessica Martell about her new book, Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire, published in 2020 by University ...
ListenJames Cook, “Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s” (Unbound, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolesce...
ListenAlison Games, "Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory" (Oxford UP, 2020 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
My Lai, Wounded Knee, Sandy Hook: the place names evoke grief and horror, each the site of a massacre. Massacres-the mass slaughter of people-might seem as old as time, but the word itself is not. ...
ListenAndre Magnan, “When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade” (U British Columbia Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), André Magnan connects the cultivation of wheat on the Canadian prairies to the c...
ListenJustin Q. Olmstead, "The United States' Entry into the First World War: The Role of British and German Diplomacy" (Boydell Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The complicated situation which led to the American entry into the First World War in 1917 is often explained from the perspective of public opinion, US domestic politics, or financial and economic...
ListenTarak Barkawi, “Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Tarak Barkawi, a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, has written an important book that will cause many of us to rethink the way we understand the relationships bet...
ListenDebjani Bhattacharyya, "Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Debjani Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press) asks: What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terr...
ListenKate Skinner, “The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Kate Skinner examines the history behind the failed project...
ListenZachary Dorner, "Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long 18th Century" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (The University of Chicago Press), medicines embody the hopes of those who prepared, sold, and ing...
ListenJohn Nathaniel Clarke, “British Media and the Rwandan Genocide” (Routledge Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It seems safe to assume that media coverage changes the behavior of politicians and voters. And it seems safe to assume this happens in cases of humanitarian crisis. But it’s really hard to go be...
ListenThomas R. Metcalf, "Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920" (University of California Press, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Thomas R. Metcalf’s Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920 (University of California Press) is an innovative remapping of empire. Imperial Connections offers a broad-rangi...
ListenLeah Bassel and Akwugo Emejulu, “Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain” (Policy Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the impact of austerity on minority women? How has this impacted on already long standing forms of social inequality across England, France and Scotland? These questions are the subject of ...
ListenS. J. Potter, "Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the aftermath of the First World War, many people sought to use the new mass medium of radio as a tool for world peace, believing that it could promote understanding across national boundaries. ...
ListenCatherine Layton, “The Life and Times of Mary, Dowager Duchess of Sutherland” (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As the thrice-married widow of one of the richest dukes in Victorian Britain, Mary Mitchell lived a life often at variance with the expectations of propriety for her time. In The Life and Times of ...
ListenJeremy Black, "A History of Britain: 1945 to Brexit" (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
According to the influential French commentator and scholar, Raymond Aron, one the great un-answered questions of the post-1945 period is how and why the British went from being ‘Romans to Italians...
ListenAidan Forth, “Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a comparative and trans-imperial approach to map a global ...
ListenWendy Moore, "No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today’s guest is journalist and author, Wendy Moore. Her new book, No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I (Basic Books) expl...
ListenLisa Ze Winters, “The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic” (U Georgia Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and th...
ListenCharles Allan McCoy, "Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS, and pandemic influenza are brutal reminders of the dangers of infectious disease. Comparing the development of disease control in Britain and the United States, from...
ListenDavid Atkinson, “The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States” (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Recent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing A...
ListenMarion Bower, "The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Joan Riviere (1883-1962) is best known for her role in promoting the ideas of others. She came to prominence in the world of psychoanalysis as Freud’s favorite translator and Melanie Klein’s earlie...
ListenKaren Teoh, “Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s to 1960s” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s to 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2018), Karen Teoh relates the history of English and Chin...
ListenEryn M. White, "The Welsh Methodist Society: The Early Societies in South-West Wales 1737-1750" (U Wales Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Eryn White, who is Reader in Welsh history at Aberystwyth University, Wales, has written an outstanding new book on the beginnings of Welsh evangelicalism. The Welsh Methodist Society: The Early So...
ListenSteven Gray, “Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the shor...
ListenCrawford Gribben, "An Introduction to John Owen: A Christian Vision for Every Stage of Life" (Crossway, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Though theology is often regarded as dealing primarily with abstract issues of belief, the prolific 17th-century English Puritan John Owen focused much of his attention on the role of Christian fai...
ListenCarolyn Day, “Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease” (Bloomsbury, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (Bloomsbury, 2017), Carolyn Day tracks the relationship between dress, appearance, and tuberculosis in the eighteenth an...
ListenAlicia Turner, "The Irish Buddhist: The Forgotten Monk Who Faced Down the British Empire" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Buddhism has always been a world religion, but its popularity in the West really dates only from the late nineteenth century, when much of the Buddhist world was subject to European colonial rule. ...
ListenJune Purvis, “Christabel Pankhurst: A Biography” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Despite her prominent role in the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain, Christabel Pankhurst has not received the same degree of attention from scholars that had been given to her mother Emme...
ListenPaul Moyer, "Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble.” These famous lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth elicit popular images of sinister witches over their cauldrons, boiling evil potions. ...
ListenAlex Wade, “Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his book Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Alex Wade examines the culture of bedroom coding, arcades, and format wars in 1980s Britain. Wade intervie...
ListenAndrew S. Ballitch, "The Gloss and the Text: William Perkins on Interpreting Scripture with Scripture" (Lexham Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Throughout the seventeenth century, and on both sides of the Atlantic, William Perkins exercised enormous influence on the ways in which protestants approached the reading of the Bible and thought ...
ListenMarcus Rediker, “The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolutionary Abolitionist” (Beacon Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the annals of abolitionist history, names like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, the Grimke sisters, and Harriet Tubman are well known. Dr. Marcus Rediker‘s new book, The Fearless Benj...
ListenHideaki Suzuki, "Slave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean: Suppression and Resistance in the 19th Century" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Hideaki Suzuki’s book Slave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean: Suppression and Resistance in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) provides an insightful perspective to the g...
ListenAntony G. Hopkins, “American Empire: A Global History” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In an expansive, engrossing, voluminously in depth analysis of the subject, Professor A. G. Hopkins, Professor Emeritus of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, one of the foremost h...
ListenMatthew Romaniello, "Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge University Press), Matthew Romaniello examines the workings of the British Russia Company and the c...
ListenDaniel Livesay, “Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Many were wealthy, but others were destitute. Many traveled to Britain to be educated, some returned to Jamaica, others went to India to seek careers and fortunes. They were members of families, wi...
ListenValerie Wayne, "Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury, 2020) reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English...
ListenSadek Hamid, “Sufis, Salafis and Islamists: The Contested Grounds of British Islamic Activism” (I.B. Tauris, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Sufis, Salafis and Islamists: The Contested Grounds of British Islamic Activism (I.B. Tauris, 2016), Sadek Hamid explores the contours of “Islamic activism”—and indeed the meaning of this key te...
ListenSasha Abramsky, "Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar" (Akashic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we are joined by Sasha Abramsky, author of Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar (Akashic Books, 2020). Lottie Dod is not a familiar name ...
ListenJean R. Freedman, “Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics” (U Illinois Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When folklorist Jean Freedman first met Peggy Seeger in 1979, Freedman was an undergraduate on her junior year abroad in London, while her American compatriot had been living in the UK for two deca...
ListenAnthimos Tsirigotis, “Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse” Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given...
ListenAnton Howes, "Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence education, ...
ListenJohn Broich, “Squadron: Ending the African Slave Trade” (Overlook Duckworth Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Despite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained in the western Indian Ocean through the mid-1800s, even after the cessation of most imperial slave trading activiti...
ListenNicholas B. Miller, "John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment: Family Lfe and World History" (Voltaire Foundation, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
During the long eighteenth century the moral and socio-political dimensions of family life and gender were hotly debated by intellectuals across Europe. John Millar, a Scottish law professor and ph...
ListenTaisu Zhang, “The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship Property in Preindustrial China and England” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Taisu Zhang ties together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics in The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge...
ListenMartin James, "State of Base: The Origins of Jungle/Drum and Bass" (Velocity Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The reissue and revision of Martin James’ State of Bass: The Origins of Jungle/Drum & Bass (Velocity Press, 2020) examines the origins and progression of British Junglism in the 1990s. Rave culture...
ListenDavid Narrett, “Adventurism and Empire” (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762-1803 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), David Narrett explores the internationa...
ListenOlivia Weisser, "ll Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England" (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Olivia Weisser, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts – Boston, to talk about her 2015 Yale University Pre...
ListenTimothy J. Shannon, “Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1758, Peter Williamson appeared on the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland, dressed as a Native American and telling a remarkable tale. He claimed that as a young boy he had been kidnapped from the ci...
ListenNadine El-Enany, "Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire" (Manchester UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How can we understand the legacy of colonialism within contemporary society? In Bordering Britain Law, Race and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2020), Nadine El-Enany, a senior lecturer in law...
ListenMark G. Hanna, “Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740” (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mark G. Hanna offers a unique perspective on the roles played by piracy in the formation of the British colonial project. In Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740 (Universit...
ListenPritipuspa Mishra, "Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha, 1803-1953" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The province of Odisha, previously “Orissa,” was the first linguistically organized province of India. In Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha,...
ListenJames Delbourgo, “Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane” (Allen Lane, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
James Delbourgo‘s new book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Allen Lane, 2017) tells the fascinatingly complex and controversial story of Hans Sloane, the man whose colle...
ListenJunior Tomlin, "Junior Tomlin: Flyer and Cover Art" (Velocity Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Junior Tomlin: Flyer & Cover Art (Velocity Press, 2020) showcases the artwork of Junior Tomlin. Featuring flyers and record covers Tomlin has created for the rave scene starting in the late 1980s, ...
ListenBrian Jenkins, “Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War” (McGill-Queens UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Described upon his death in 1887 as the ideal diplomatist, Richard Lyons served Great Britain in a variety of roles over the course of a long and distinguished career. In Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in ...
ListenLakshmi Subramanian, "The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subjects in India's Western Littoral" (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lakshmi Subramanian’s The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subjects in India's Western Littoral (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an amphibious history written around the juncture o...
ListenSasha Turner, “Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Child-Rearing, and Slavery in Jamaica” (Penn Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sasha Turner’s Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Child-Rearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) reveals enslaved women’s contrasting ideas about maternity and raising chi...
ListenPhilip Reid, "The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600-1800" (Brill, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
To the average landlubber, the merchant ships that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1800 seem little different from their counterparts two centuries beforehand. By detailing how these ships were built...
ListenEmily C. Nacol, “An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Emily C. Nacol has written a fascinating interrogation of the idea of risk, the concept of vulnerability, and the evolution of probabilistic thinking as conceived of and explored by four of the pre...
ListenPeter Naldrett, “Around the Coast in 80 Days" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Peter Naldrett, author of Around the Coast in 80 Days: A Guide to Britain’s Best Coastal Towns, Beaches, Cliffs, & Headlands (Bloomsbury) begins his enjoyable trip around the British coast with the...
ListenDavid Cannadine, “Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906” (Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sir David Cannadine, Professor of History at Princeton University, president of the British Academy, and the general editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, narrates the century of P...
ListenKara Moskowitz, "Seeing Like A Citizen" (Ohio UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kara Moskowitz, Assistant Professor of African History as the University of Missouri-St. Louis. has written a terrific book, Seeing Like A Citizen: Decolonization, Development and the Making of Ken...
ListenAngus McLaren, “Playboys and Mayfair Men: Crime, Class, Masculinity, and Fascism in 1930s London” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In December of 1937, four men robbed a representative of the diamond company Cartier of eight diamond rings in the Hyde Park Hotel. What made this crime unique was the identity of the perpetrators:...
ListenJeremy Black, "Mapping Shakespeare: An Exploration of Shakespeare’s World through Maps" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jeremy Black, the prolific professor of history at Exeter University, has published a stunningly attractive volume entitled, Mapping Shakespeare: An Exploration of Shakespeare’s World through Maps ...
ListenMonica Mattfeld, “Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship” (Penn State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Monica Mattfeld’s Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State University Press, 2017) explores the complex relationship between men and their horses, and r...
ListenEvan Smith, "No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (Routledge, 2020) is the first to outline the history of the tactic of ‘no platforming’ at British universities si...
ListenRay Cashman, “Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border” (U Wisconsin Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do individuals on national or societal peripheries make use of tradition and to what ends? How can narratives discursively construct a complex worldview? These are some of the questions Ray Cas...
ListenAli Meghji, "Black Middle-Class Britannia: Identities, Repertoires, Cultural Consumption" (Manchester UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who are the Black middle-class in Britain? In Black Middle-Class Britannia: Identities, Repertoires, Cultural Consumption (Manchester University Press, 2019) Ali Meghji, a lecturer in social inequa...
ListenRandy M. Browne, “Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Randy M. Browne in Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) uses the overlooked archives of the fiscal, a legal legacy from Dutch colonialism, and protect...
ListenArchie Brown, "The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What brought about an end to the Cold War has long been a subject of speculation and mythology. One prominent argument is that the United States simply bankrupted the Soviet Union, outspending the ...
ListenCrawford Gribben, “John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Though the preeminent English theologian of the 17th century, there is much about John Owen’s life which remains obscured to us today. One of the achievements of Crawford Gribben‘s new book John O...
ListenZachary Carter, "Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Keynes was not only an economist but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the 20th century, one who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. As a...
ListenSheshalatha Reddy, “British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) examines historical and literary texts relating to three rebellion...
ListenAlanna O’Malley, "The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo Crisis, 1960-1964" (Manchester UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the summer of 1960, the Republic of the Congo won its independence from Belgium. Only one week later, however, Belgium had already dispatched paratroopers into the country and the Congolese gove...
ListenDavid G. Morgan-Owen, “The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914” (Oxford University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
David Morgan-Owen‘s The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2017) tells a complex story clearly and concisely. In the decades prior t...
ListenOded Y. Steinberg, "Anglo-German Thought in the Victorian Era" (U Penn Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Oded Y. Steinberg (DPhil Oxford) is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters,?Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Next year (2020-21), Steinberg will begin ...
ListenPadraic Scanlan, “Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolutions” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What was the British abolition of the slave trade like in practice? Padraic Scanlan, in his beautifully-written first book, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revo...
ListenJeremy Black, "The World of James Bond: The Lives and Times of 007" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
This book by renowned Professor of History Jeremy Black presents an insightful and hugely entertaining exploration of the political and cultural context of the Bond books and films. In The World of...
ListenJenny Natasha and Tom Boniface-Webb, “I Was Britpopped: The A-Z of Britpop” (Valley Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
I Was Britpopped: The A-Z of Britpop (Valley Press, 2017) is a comprehensive guide to the people, the bands, the places, and the events that shaped British music in the mid-to-late 1990s. Taking on...
ListenPhilip A. Craig, "The Bond of Grace and Duty in the Soteriology of John Owen" (Founders Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Philip A. Craig’s new book on John Owen, the premier puritan theologian, demonstrates how carefully his subject tracked the influence of antinomianism in his writing. Craig’s book roots Owen’s idea...
ListenJack Greene, “Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait” (UVA Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is the most recent work from distinguished historian Jack Greene. Using a treasure trove of records from the mid...
ListenJoy White, "Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City" (Repeater Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How are black lives lived in the contemporary city? In Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City, Dr Joy White, a sociologist and ethnographer based in London, explores the case study of New...
ListenRichard Power Sayeed, “1997: The Future that Never Happened (Zed Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Richard Power Sayeed’s book, 1997: The Future that Never Happened (Zed Books, 2017), is a brilliant and exhaustively researched account of the late 1990s. The subject matter covered is broad. From...
ListenJóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, "Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Fascination with the Viking Age seems to be at an all-time high, though it has never really gone out of fashion. There is something irresistible about the Vikings, a civilization dedicated to explo...
ListenAmanda Bidnall, “The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945-1965” (Liverpool UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Just after World War II, West Indians began moving to London in large numbers. The artists, writers, and musicians among them found a place to create, and they found ways to express their complex n...
ListenWhy Did the Allies Win World War One? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Great War was perhaps the greatest single upheaval of the 20th century. While World War II saw more lives lost, in terms of the shock to European/Western civilization, the Great War was a more ...
ListenCandace Ward, “Crossing the Line: Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation” (UVA Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Candace Ward’s Crossing the Line: Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation (University of Virginia Press, 2017) foregrounds an understudied group of writers: ...
ListenKenneth Womack, "Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and The End of The Beatles" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
To what degree did each of The Beatles exhibit emotional intelligence in the band’s final year? You'll find out in the discussion I had with Kenneth Womack about his new book Solid State: The Story...
ListenRebecca Fraser, “The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America” (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Rebecca Fraser is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster whose work has been published in Tatler, Vogue, The Times, and The Spectator. President of the Bronte Society for many years, she is the auth...
ListenBrian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...
ListenKatherine Paugh, “The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Katherine Paugh‘s new book The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines the crucial role that reproduction took in th...
ListenAmy Harris, "Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England: Share and Share Alike" (Manchester UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England: Share and Share Alike (Manchester University Press, 2016), by Amy Harris, examines the impact sisters and brothers had on eighteenth-century En...
ListenLaura Lee, “Oscar’s Ghost: The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy” (Amberley, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Laura Lee’s Oscar’s Ghost: The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy (Amberley Publishing, 2017) offers a detailed investigation of a conflict involving the writer and his two friends with whom he mainta...
ListenMichael Braddick, "The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As historical topics, political revolutions come in and out of fashion. At the moment the American Revolution as an ideological struggle engages the public, but historians are less sure. Books that...
ListenJulia Fawcett, “Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801” (U. Michigan Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“How can the modern individual maintain control over his or her self-representation when the whole world seems to be watching?” This is the question that prompts Julia Fawcett‘s new book, Spectacul...
ListenManuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020...
ListenLinda Simon, “Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper” (Reaktion Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are your impressions when you think of the flapper? Who is she in your mind? When and where does she exist? In her new book Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper (Reaktion Books, 2017), Li...
ListenCoryne Hall, "Queen Victoria and the Romanovs: 60 Years of Mutual Distrust" (Amberley, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe was anchored on one end by the redoubtable Queen Victoria (1819 -1901), the doyenne of sovereigns, and at the opposite end by the autocratic Romano...
ListenJane McCabe, “Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Jane McCabe, Lecturer in the Department of History and Art History at the Universit...
ListenMary Fraser, "Policing the Home Front, 1914-1918: The Control of the British Population at War" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Britain went to war in 1914, policemen throughout Great Britain found themselves called upon to perform an ever-increasing range of new tasks that reflected the expanded power of the British s...
ListenHarry Bennett, “The Royal Navy in the Age of Austerity, 1919-1922: Naval and Foreign Policy under Lloyd George” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Great Britain’s victory in the First World War brought with it the competing challenges of defending an expanded empire while reducing military expenditures. In The Royal Navy in the Age of Austeri...
ListenStanley D. M. Carpenter, "Southern Gambit: Cornwallis and the British March to Yorktown" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Charles Lord Cornwallis’s campaign through the southern American colonies came to an ignominious close on October 19, 1781, on an open field outside Yorktown, Virginia. At approximately noon, Cornw...
ListenAndrea L. Stanton, “This is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine” (U of Texas Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Despite the recent booms in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, technology studies still remain scarce: one of the recent attempts to fill the void is Andrea L. Stanton‘s ‘This is Jerusa...
ListenNatasha J. Lightfoot, "Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation" (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2015), Natasha J. Lightfoot traces the ways Antiguans and Barbudans experienced freedom in the immedi...
ListenAled Davies, “The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-war Britain” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the decades following the end of the Second World War, the British economy evolved from a manufacturing-based economy to one driven by service industries, most notably finance. As Aled Davies ex...
ListenAlexander Rocklin, "The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The history of the Caribbean Island of Trinidad bears witness to an important interplay between the religious practices of peoples of South Asian and those of peoples of African descent, and in par...
ListenGareth M. Thomas, “Down’s Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Drawing on an ethnography of Down’s syndrome screening in two UK clinics, Gareth M. Thomas‘ Down’s Syndrome and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic (Routledge...
ListenSheetal Chhabria, "Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the 1870s, as colonial India witnessed some of the worst famines in its history where 6-10 million perished, observers watched in astonishment as famished people set out for the city of Bombay o...
ListenCarla Pestana, “The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Carla Pestana’s new book The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a rousing look at a transformative moment in Caribbean history. Pestan...
ListenAlexander Zevin, "Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Economist is a curious publication. It always takes a point of view (as opposed to the all-the-news-that’s-fit-to-print approach). It maintains a uniform voice (editors and writers are typicall...
ListenEric Ash, “The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England” (Johns Hopkins, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book Th...
ListenDavid A. Bateman, "Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the US, the UK, and France" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
David A. Bateman’s fascinating new book opens with a puzzle. In 19th-century America, why was mass democratization – abolishing property and tax qualifications – accompanied by the mass disenfranch...
ListenJatinder Mann, “The Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s” (Peter Lang, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, The Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s (Peter Lang Publishing, 2016), Jatinder Mann, an assistant professor of hi...
ListenJulia Stephens, “Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As British colonial rulers expanded their control in South Asia legal resolutions were increasingly shaped by the English classification of social life. The definitional divide that structured the ...
ListenJustin Gest, “The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In our era of economic instability, rising inequality, and widespread immigration, complaints about fairness and life chances are coming from an interesting source: white people, specifically membe...
ListenLeslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...
ListenKief Hillsbery, “Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kief Hillsbery‘s Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) follows the career of Nigel Halleck, an English tax assessor in employ of...
ListenCaspar Melville, "It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City" (Manchester UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does music help us to understand the contemporary city? In It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City (Manchester UP, 2019), Caspar Melville, co-chair of the ...
ListenDavid Matthews, “Medievalism: A Critical History” (Boydell and Brewer, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A revealing exploration of representative modes of medievalism, Medievalism: A Critical History (Boydell & Brewer; hardcover 2015, paperback 2017), by David Matthews, examines the people, instituti...
ListenGreat Books: Maureen McLane on Wordsworth's Poetry from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The British romantic poet William Wordsworth is best known for his moving evocations of nature, his celebration of childhood, and his quest to find a shared humanity in his poetry. He’s also widely...
ListenPeter Marshall, “Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Few events in English history are as familiar to people today as the English Reformation, yet the vast amount of attention it has received can distort our understanding of it. In Heretics and Belie...
ListenRobert Elmer, "Piercing Heaven: Prayers of the Puritans" (Lexham Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Robert Elmer, who is a communications specialist at Seattle Pacific University, a prolific writer of historical fiction, and the author of over fifty published titles, has published a ground-breaki...
ListenAndrew Boyd, “The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters: The Linchpin of Victory, 1935-1942” (Seaforth Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the 1930s the Royal Navy faced the problem of defending its empire in eastern Asia and Australia against the formidable naval power of Japan. How they responded to this threat in the final years...
ListenSusan Newcombe, "Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis" (Equinox, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paying special attention to sociocultural threads form the period 1945-1980, Susan Newcombe's new book Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis (Equinox, 2019) charts the trajec...
ListenMichael J. Turner” Radicalism and Reputation: The Career of Bronterre O’Brien” (Michigan State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From humble beginnings James Bronterre O’Brien became one of the leading figures in British radical politics in the first half of the 19th century, thanks in no small measure to his skills as a jou...
ListenDavid Swift, "A Left for Itself: Left-Wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism" (Zero Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why has the recent crisis of capitalism benefitted the nationalist right rather than the left? Is there a tension between socio-economic realities and the politico-cultural views of leftists? In hi...
ListenMarilyn Palmer and Ian West, “Technology and the Country House” (Historic England Publishing/U.Chicago, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For the aristocracy in Britain and Ireland, country house living was dependent upon the labors of men and women who performed innumerable chores involving cooking, cleaning, and the basic operation...
ListenDavid Block, "Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we are joined by David Block, author of Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Block is a baseball hist...
ListenJulie Gottlieb, “‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain” (Palgrave Macmilan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Historically, foreign policy has been seen as a sphere shaped and determined by the concerns of men alone. In ‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Palgrave Macmillan...
ListenAsa McKercher, "Canada and the World since 1867" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you haven’t been able to tell by the way I pronounce the word “about,” I should probably let you know that I’m from Canada. And I have to make a confession––growing up in Vancouver, I was fed th...
ListenSteve Dunn, “Securing the Narrow Sea: The Dover Patrol, 1914-1918” (Seaforth/US Naval Institute, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most accounts about the naval battles of the First World War focus upon the stalemate between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet, or the German raiders who attempted to disrupt ...
ListenTom Chaffin, "Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations" (St. Martins, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Of the many thousands who participated in the American and French revolutions in the late 18th century, only a handful played roles in both events. Among that select number were Thomas Jefferson an...
ListenMarie Hicks, “Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How did gender relations change in the computing industry? And how did the UK go from leading the world to having an all but extinct computer industry by the 1970s? In Programmed Inequality: How Br...
ListenAnna Bull, "Class, Control, and Classical Music" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the relationship between inequality and classical music? In Class, Control, and Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anna Bull, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University ...
ListenKate Murphy, “Behind the Wireless: A History of Early Women at the BBC” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From the early days of the BBC in 1922, women were everywhere in the broadcasting company’s offices. They were absent, however, argues Dr. Kate Murphy from most of the historiography devoted to thi...
ListenVincent Brown, "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended the domain of capitalist agriculture, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave tr...
ListenTony Collins, “The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby” (Bloomsbury, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The 2017 Six Nations rugby tournament concluded this weekend. England successfully defended its championship, despite losing the last match against a strong Ireland side in Dublin–England’s only lo...
ListenKate Imy, "Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her fascinating and remarkable new book Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army (Stanford University Press, 2019), Kate Imy explores the negotiation of religious identit...
ListenPhoebe Chow, “Britain’s Imperial Retreat from China, 1900-1931” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
At the start of the twentieth century Britain’s relationship with China was defined by the economic and political dominance Britain exerted in the country as an imperial power, a dominance that wou...
ListenSir John Redwood, "We Don't Believe You: Why Populists and the Establishment See the World Differently" (Bite-Sized Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In We Don't Believe You: Why Populists and the Establishment See the World Differently (Bite-Sized Book, 2019), Sir John Redwood gives us fresh insights into why the populist movements and parties ...
ListenGlyne Griffith, “The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The BBC radio program “Caribbean Voices” aired for fifteen years and introduced writers like George Lamming, Louise Bennett, Sam Selvon and others to listeners on both sides of the Atlantic. Glyne...
ListenMatt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...
ListenRyan Vieira, “Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the British World” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How did the idea of time change during the nineteenth century? In Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the British World (Oxford University ...
ListenGreat Books: Julie Carlson on Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus when she was nineteen years old on a bet. The novel spawned two centuries of creatures that turn against their makers...
ListenHarris Beider, “White Working-Class Voices: Multiculturalism, Community-Building, and Change” (Policy Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Harris Beider is the author of White Working-Class Voices: Multiculturalism, Community-Building, and Change (Policy Press, 2015). Beider is chair in Community Cohesion at the Center for Trust, Peac...
ListenJonathan Scott, "How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jonathan Scott is one of the most original interpreters of the early modern world. How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800 (Yale University Press, 2019) is a deft an...
ListenHelen Glew, “Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900-1955” (Manchester UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What role has gender played in government institutions? In Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council 1900-1955, Helen Glew, a Senior Lecturer ...
ListenMathias Haeussler, "Helmut Schmidt and British-German Relations: A European Misunderstanding" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt grew up as a devout Anglophile, yet he clashed heavily and repeatedly with his British counterparts Wilson, Callaghan, and Thatcher during his time ...
ListenNancy Weiss Malkiel, ‘Keep the Damned Women Out’: The Struggle for Coeducation” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Within the context of the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, elite institutions of higher education began to feel pressure to open their doors to women. In ‘Keep the Damned Women Out’: The Str...
ListenChristopher J. Lee, "Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa" (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (Duke University Press, 2014), Christopher J. Lee recovers the forgotten experiences of mu...
ListenDave Gosse, “Abolition and Plantation Management in Jamaica, 1807-1838” (U. of the West Indies Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dave Gosse’s recent book Abolition and Plantation Management in Jamaica, 1807-1838 (University of the West Indies Press, 2012), looks at a crucial period in Jamaican history. The time between the a...
ListenThe Origins of World War One from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who or what originated and/or caused the Great War from breaking out in July 1914? Was it Serbia with its expansionist and aggressive designs on Austria-Hungary? Was it Austria-Hungary itself, unne...
ListenHelen Rappaport, “Victoria: The Heart and Mind of a Young Queen” (Harper Design, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The term historical fiction covers a wide range from what the mystery writer Josephine Tey once dubbed “history with conversation” to outright invention shading into fantasy. But behind every story...
ListenElizabeth Goldring, "Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Limning – the painting of miniature portraits – was an important art form in 16th-century Europe. Among its greatest practitioners was Nicholas Hilliard, who enjoyed an international reputation for...
ListenOwen McGee, “Arthur Griffith” (Merrion Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As the founder of Sinn Fin and a leading architect of Irish independence, Arthur Griffith ranks as one of the founding fathers of modern Ireland. In his book Arthur Griffith (Merrion Press, 2015), ...
ListenJamie L. H. Goodall, "Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars" (The History Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The story of Chesapeake pirates and patriots begins with a land dispute and ends with the untimely death of an oyster dredger at the hands of the Maryland Oyster Navy. From the golden age of piracy...
ListenDavid B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner, eds. “Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England” (Duquesne UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2016) is a collection of essays that offers new dimensions for reading and understanding Shakespeare...
ListenAdrian Wisnicki, "Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Adrian Wisnicki talks about the British expeditionary literature of the late 1800s. Reading between the lines of Victorian travel accounts, Wisnicki sees outlines of a bigger story — local peoples,...
ListenMatt Houlbrook, “Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook” (U. of Chicago Press 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How should we understand the interwar years in Britain? In Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (University of Chicago Press, 2016) Matt Houlbrook, Profe...
ListenJonathan Hopkin, "Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Should we understand the rise of Trump or the success of Brexit in terms of populism? Culture? Xenophobia? Do the same political forces produce Sanders and Trump? In his new book Anti-System Politi...
ListenRichard Griffiths, “What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-1945” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
During the mid- to late 1930s, a small but socially prominent group of right-wing Britons took a public stance in support of the Nazi regime in Germany. While many of them curtailed their activitie...
ListenAimee Fox, "Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Learning, innovation and adaptation are not concepts that we necessarily associate with the British Army of the First World War. Yet the need to learn from mistakes, to exploit new opportunities an...
ListenMichael Brown, “The Irish Enlightenment” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Traditionally histories of the Enlightenment era exclude Ireland in the belief that the movement left little impression on developments. In The Irish Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2016),...
ListenPhillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...
ListenJulie Holcomb, “Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy” (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The question of how we should act when facing something gravely immoral is a difficult one. This is particularly true when that immorality touches upon our everyday life. Such was the issue that Qu...
ListenSarah Stockwell, "The British End of the British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the aftermath of the Second World War, Great Britain was forced to give up the bulk of its vast, globe-spanning empire. While most histories of this process have examined it from the perspective...
ListenTom Mills, “The BBC: Myth of a Public Service” (Verso, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The BBC is often thought to be a great, impartial, defender of British values and society. In The BBC: Myth of a Public Service (Verso, 2016), Tom Mills, a lecturer in Sociology at Aston University...
ListenAbigail Shinn, "Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning" (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why did early modern people change their religious affiliation? And how did they represent that change in writing? In this outstanding new book, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales...
ListenColl Thrush, “Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of...
ListenAlistair Sponsel, "Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that woul...
ListenKirsty Sedgman, “Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales” (Intellect Books 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The value of the arts is a constant and vital question in contemporary culture. In Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (Intellect Books, 2016) Kirsty Sedgman, Br...
ListenS. Bergès, E. Hunt Botting, A. Coffee, "The Wollstonecraftian Mind" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019) is an extensive compendium of Mary Wollstonecraft as a writer, as an interlocutor, as a philosopher and political theorist, and as a feminist thinker. T...
ListenColin Holmes, “Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
During the Second World War millions of Britons tuned in nightly to hear the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw coming from Nazi Germany. Though the label was broadly applied to a number of English-speakin...
ListenCarol Zaleski, "The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings" (FSG, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Starting in the early 1930s, a small group of academics and writers met weekly in a pub in Oxford, England to discuss literature, religion, and ideas. Known as the Inklings, it was in part from the...
ListenMarc Steinberg, “England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Marc Steinberg is a professor of sociology at Smith College. His latest book, England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a resp...
ListenJulie MacArthur, "Dedan Kimathi on Trial: Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion" (Ohio UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 2015, University of Toronto professor Julie MacArthur decided to follow a couple more leads in the search for the long-missing, feared-lost transcript of the trial of legendary Mau Mau leader De...
ListenJohn Bew, “Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As Labour Party leader, member of Winston Churchill’s governing coalition during the Second World War, and prime minister of the epochal postwar government that established the welfare state, Cleme...
ListenAlan Gallay, "Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sir Walter Ralegh was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. She showered him with estates and political appointments. He envisioned her becoming empress of a universal empire. She gave him the opportunity...
ListenJack Hamilton, “Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2016), Jack Hamilton examines major American and British recording artists of the 1960s to explain what ...
ListenTimothy Barnard, "Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942" (NUS Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Imperial Creature: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (National University of Singapore Press, 2019), Timothy Barnard explores the more-than-human entanglements between em...
ListenCarina E. Ray, “Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana” (Ohio UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2015), Carina E. Ray interrogates the intersections of race, marriage, gender and e...
ListenPeter Hart, "The Gallipoli Evacuation" (Living History, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One of the most well-told episodes of the First World War, the 1915 Gallipoli expedition, also has its own long-ignored aspects - specifically, the story of how the Allied force successfully evacua...
ListenChristian J. Koot, "A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake" (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Labels on a map: Surrey. Lower Norfolk. The Isle of Wight. Northumberland. Middlesex. Not a map England, but of the British colonies of Virginia and Maryland published in 1673. This is a map that p...
ListenChristopher Woolgar, “The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Food was central to the lives of people in England during the Middle Ages in ways different than it is today. As Christopher Woolgar reveals in his book The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 (Y...
ListenStuart Elden, "Shakespearean Territories" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What can Shakespeare tell us about territory, and what can territory tell us about Shakespeare? In Shakespearean Territories (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Stuart Elden, Professor of Politic...
ListenChristopher Frank, "Workers, Unions and Payments in Kind: The Fight for Real Wages in Britain, 1820-1914" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The passage of the 1831 Truck Act was intended to end throughout the United Kingdom the practice of paying employees in truck, or goods, rather than in money. As Christopher Frank reveals in Worker...
ListenJon Stobart and Mark Rothery, “Consumption and the Country House” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
During the 18th century English country houses served an important function in their society as stages for the display of the status and power of the landed aristocracy. As Jon Stobart and Mark Rot...
ListenPriya Satia, "Time's Monster: How History Makes History" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How we see the past helps shape our understanding of the present. In the realm of statecraft and empire, understandings of the meaning of history, the progression of time, and the end to which it m...
ListenD. J. Taylor, "The Lost Girls: Love and Literature in Wartime London" (Pegasus Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who were the Lost Girls? All coming from broken or failed Upper-middle Class families; the Lost Girls were all chic, glamorous, and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonett...
ListenMarc-William Palen, “The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Ang...
ListenKiran Klaus Patel, "Project Europe: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Project Europe made waves when it was published in German in 2018 (CH Beck) and was soon translated into English as Project Europe: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020). A clue to its crossover appeal ca...
ListenPenny Sinanoglou, "Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of the Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is the first history of the ideological and political forces that led to the idea of partit...
ListenWilliam Cavert, “The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Air pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the...
ListenN. Mclaughlin and J. Braniff, "How Belfast Got the Blues: A Cultural History of Popular Music in The 1960s" (Intellect, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There is no shortage of books about the British Invasion or the history of R&B and the Blues in the United Kingdom. Belfast might seem like something of a peripheral backwater to that story, only m...
ListenPaul Lay, "Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate" (Head of Zeus, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In today’s episode, we catch up with Paul Lay, editor of the leading journal History Today, and a senior research fellow in early modern history at the University of Buckingham. Paul is the author ...
ListenAnne Mac Lellan, “Dorothy Stopford Price: Rebel Doctor” (Irish Academic Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Among the achievements of Irish medicine in the twentieth century was ending the persistent epidemic of tuberculosis throughout the island, and one of the central figures in that effort was Dorothy...
ListenLloyd Bowen, "John Poyer, the Civil Wars in Pembrokeshire and the British Revolutions" (U Wales Press, 2021) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lloyd Bowen, who teaches history at Cardiff University, is a leading authority on Wales in the seventeenth century. His latest book, John Poyer, the Civil Wars in Pembrokeshire and the British Revo...
ListenK. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...
ListenAnders Ingram, “Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
You read a lot about “Orientalism,” that is, the often odd ways in which Westerners tried to understand predominantly Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. You don’t read a lot about good Western sc...
ListenLia Paradis, "Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire" (I. B. Tauris, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Empty House, Sherlock Holmes makes a dramatic reappearance in the surgery of his friend Dr Watson. Presumed dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes recounts his travels in the Ea...
ListenGerald Dawe, "The Sound of the Shuttle: Essays on Cultural Belonging and Protestantism in Northern Ireland" (Irish Academic Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One of the leading poets of his generation, Gerald Dawe is also a fellow emeritus and professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. Throughout his long writing career he has been thinking about t...
ListenRobert O’Kell, “Disraeli: The Romance of Politics” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Benjamin Disraeli was unique among British prime ministers in the 19th century in many ways, but perhaps none more so than for his career as a novelist. Whereas many scholars have treated Disraeli’...
ListenCarolyn Conley, "Debauched, Desperate, Deranged: Women Who Killed, London 1674-1913" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we speak to Carolyn Conley, Professor Emerita from the University of Alabama – Birmingham, about her new book Debauched, Desperate, Deranged: Women Who Killed, London 1674-1913 (Oxford UP, 20...
ListenJeremy Black, "Geographies of an Imperial Power: The British World, 1688-1815" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we talk to Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter University, UK, about two of his most recent book projects, both of which relate to the ways in which we think about empires, and the B...
ListenPatricia McCarthy, “Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland” (Paul Mellon Centre, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the early 18th century, country houses in Ireland underwent a dramatic physical transformation. In her book Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland (Paul Mellon Centre, 2016), Patricia McC...
ListenMark Somos, "American States of Nature: The Origins of Independence, 1761-1775" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Federalist no. 2, John Jay considered the ‘wide spreading country’ of the American republic. It was, he argued, as if the land itself was fashioned by the hand of Providence, which ‘in a particu...
ListenLauren Working, "The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his Relation of the second voyage to Guiana, published in 1596, George Chapman put the imperial ambitions of England into a telling verse couplet. ‘Riches, and Conquest, and Renowne I sing. / Ri...
ListenDermot Meleady, “John Redmond: The National Leader” (Merrion Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Though in many ways the forgotten man of Irish politics, John Redmond came closer to achieving the long-sought goal of Home Rule for Ireland than had his more illustrious predecessors Daniel O’Conn...
ListenDinyar Patel, "Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present disco...
ListenDaniel Kennefick, "No Shadow of Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Daniel Kennefick talks about resistance to relativity theory in the early twentieth century and the huge challenges that faced British astronomers who wanted to test the theory during the solar ecl...
ListenAdam Mendelsohn, “The Rag Race” (NYU Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York University Press, 2015), Adam Mendelsohn, Associate Professor of History at the University of Cape T...
ListenGaby Mahlberg, "The English Republican Exiles in Europe during the Restoration" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 changed the lives of English republicans for good. Despite the Declaration of Breda, where Charles II promised to forgive those who had acted against ...
ListenLori Gemeiner-Bihler, "Cities of Refuge: German Jews in London and New York, 1935-1945" (SUNY Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the years following Hitler’s rise to power, German Jews faced increasingly restrictive antisemitic laws, and many responded by fleeing to more tolerant countries. Cities of Refuge: German Jews i...
ListenLes Back, “Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters” (Goldsmiths Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why does higher education still matter? In Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters, Les Back, a professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, offers a series o...
ListenS. Burrows and G. Roe, "Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies" (Liverpool UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies (Liverpool UP, 2020) explores how a set of inter-related digital projects are transforming our vision of ...
ListenKim A. Wagner, "Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
You've probably seen the film Gandhi and you likely think that you know all about the Amritsar Massacre of 1919. After all, Richard Attenborough’s 1982 academy award winning film did an incredible ...
ListenSteve Kemper, “A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham” (W. W. Norton, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham (W. W. Norton, 2016), freelance journalist Steve Kemper details the adventurous, wandering life of the man who later inspired th...
ListenJeremy Black, "George III: Madness and Majesty" (Penguin, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
King of Britain for sixty years and the last king of what would become the United States, George III inspired both hatred and loyalty and is now best known for two reasons: as a villainous tyrant f...
ListenEileen Botting, "The Wollstonecraftian Mind" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Eileen Hunt Botting is Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and co-editor with Sandrine Berges and Alan Coffee of the anthology The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019). The collection ...
ListenDaniel Tilles, “British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932-1940” (Bloomsburg, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932-1940 (Bloomsbury, 2015), Daniel Tilles, Assistant Professor of History at the Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland, examines the use o...
ListenGeorge Musgrave, "Can Music Make You Sick?: Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition" (U Westminster Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detail...
ListenGraham T. Clews, "Churchill’s Phoney War: A Study in Folly and Frustration" (Naval Institute Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Given the overwhelming amount of books printed in the past ten years on various (usually rather obscure) aspects of Sir Winston Churchill’s glorious career, it is of great interest that so little h...
ListenDouglas Clark, “Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943)” (Earnshaw Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Douglas Clark’s new Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943) (Earnshaw Books Limited, 2016) is a three-volume study of extraterritoriality and its transnation...
ListenPeter Mandler, "The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How did public demand shape education in the 20th century? In The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford UP, 2020), Peter Mandler, Prof...
ListenIngrid Horrocks, "Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ingrid Horrocks talks about the way women travelers, specifically women wanderers, are represented in late-eighteenth century literature, particularly in the work of women writers. Horrocks in an a...
ListenEmma Jackson, “Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Fixed in Mobility” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the experience of young homeless people? What does this experience tell us about space, place and society? In Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Fixed in Mobility (Routledge, 2015), Dr....
ListenSeán Crosson, "Gaelic Games on Film" (Cork UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we are joined by Seán Crosson, leader of the Sport and Exercise Research Group at NUI Galway, co-director of the MA in Sports Journalism and Communication, and Professor at the Huston School ...
ListenJames Nott, “Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918-1960” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918-1960 (Oxford University Press, 2016), cultural historian James Nott charts the untold ...
ListenDavid Head, "A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution" (Pegasus Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In March 1783, George Washington confronted a meeting of disgruntled Continental Army officers at their encampment at Newburgh, New York. In his book A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newbu...
ListenKennetta H. Perry, “London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of people from the British Commonwealth migrated the United Kingdom with plans to settle and find work. Kennetta Hammond Perry‘s ne...
ListenThe Treaty of Versailles One Hundred Years On from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Versailles Treaty of 1919, celebrates its one-hundred anniversary this year. And, yet unlike the more recent centenaries, such as that of the outbreak of the Great War or the Russian Revolution...
ListenNicola Rollock et al. “The Colour of Class: The Educational Strategies of the Black Middle Classes” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The experience of the African American middle class has been an important area of research in the USA. However, the British experience has, by comparison, not been subject to the same amount of att...
ListenReider Payne, "War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Though Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh remains well known today for his role in shaping the post-Napoleonic peace settlement in Europe, his half-brother Sir Charles Stewart has received far le...
ListenJessica Parr, “Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon” (UP of Mississippi, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
George Whitefield was a complex man driven by a simple idea, the new birth that brought salvation. Because of such passion, Whitefield received both enthusiastic support, preaching to audiences num...
ListenJames M. Vaughn, "The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his notes for a speech to be delivered in the House of Commons in the wake of American Independence, the MP and imperial reformer Edmund Burke observed that ‘Some people are great Lovers of unif...
ListenCaroline Shaw, “Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Published in October 2015, Caroline Shaw‘s timely new book, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford University Press, 2015), traces the intert...
ListenDavid D. Hall, "The Puritans: A Transatlantic History" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
This book is a sweeping transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role in the story of America. Shedding critical new...
ListenCarin Berkowitz, “Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Carin Berkowitz‘s new book takes readers into the world of nineteenth century London to explore the landscape of medicine and surgery along with Charles Bell, artist-anatomist-teacher-natural philo...
ListenSidharthan Maunaguru, "Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War" (U Washington Press 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sidharthan Maunaguru’s Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War (University of Washington Press 2019) is an unusual ethnography of the ‘in-betweenness’ a...
ListenEllen Boucher, “Empire’s Children” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For almost 100 years, it seemed like a good, even wholesome and optimistic idea to take young, working-class and poor British children and resettle them, quite on their own and apart from their fam...
ListenJulia Neuberger, "Antisemitism: What It Is, What It Isn’t, Why It Matters" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anti-Semitic incidents, ranging from vandalism through murder, are on the rise in Great Britain, and across Europe and North America. Julia Neuberger - Senior Rabbi at West London Synagogue, a memb...
ListenRichard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the ...
ListenRichard Whatmore, "Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the Fre...
ListenDeborah Cohen, “Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her previous book, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (Yale University Press, 2006), Deborah Cohen took us into the homes of Britons and examined their relation to their habitat a...
ListenClaire Chambers, “Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels” (Palgrave, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
After the Rushdie affair in 1989 there was an important shift in the public life of British Muslims. Their image came under closer scrutiny which led to new social policies and self-perceptions. Th...
ListenJonathan Green, “Green’s Dictionary of Slang” (Hodder Education, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Over the last thirty years, Jonathon Green has established himself as a major figure in lexicography, specialising in English slang. During this time he has accumulated a database of over half a mi...
ListenEleanor Parker, "Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For all of their prominence in the popular imagination today, the historical record of the Viking presence in England is limited, with much of what we know about them dependent upon the literary ac...
ListenAlberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...
ListenSally Holloway, "The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What was the role of love and courtship in eighteenth-century English culture? In her new book, The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture (Oxford University Pr...
ListenKathleen Sheppard, "The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology" (Lexington, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
After Napoleon occupied Egypt, Europeans became obsessed with the ancient cultures of the Nile. In Britain, the center of Egyptology research was University College London (UCL). At the heart of th...
ListenStephen R. Taaffe, "Washington’s Revolutionary War Generals" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When George Washington led the United States to victory in the American Revolution, he did so in collaboration with seventy-three other men who served as major and brigadier generals in the Contine...
ListenWhat Should We Think of the British Empire? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The British Empire at its greatest extent covered approximately twenty-five percent of the surface of the globe with the same percentage of the world so population under its rule, directly or indir...
ListenAppeasement Eighty Years On from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
According to one dictionary definition, the term means: “to yield or concede to the belligerent demands of (a nation, group, person, etc.) in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of just...
ListenDavid Hayton, "Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier" (Manchester UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Acclaimed after the Second World War as England's greatest historian, Sir Lewis Namier was an eastern European immigrant who came to idealise the English gentleman and enjoyed close friendship with...
ListenIan Parker, "Psychoanalysis, Clinic, and Context: Subjectivity, History, and Autobiography" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There are many pathways into the world of psychoanalysis. Some arrive from fields like psychiatry and psychology; some from literature, philosophy, and the humanities; and others from political org...
ListenPaula McQuade, "Catechisms and Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century England" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paula McQuade, professor of English literature at DePaul University, is the author of a brilliant new account of Catechisms and Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University ...
ListenTrevor Thompson, "Playing for Australia: The First Socceroos, Asia, and World Football" (Fair Play, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we are joined by Trevor Thompson, a journalist who has reported on association football in Australia and around the world since the 1980s. He is also the author of Playing for Australia: The ...
ListenCarlton F. W. Larson, "The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Carlton F. W. Larson is the author of The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2019). The Trials of Allegiance looks at the law of treason du...
ListenRussell Potter, "Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-year Search" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1845, two British naval ships left England with 129 men in search of the Northwest Passage. They were never heard from again. The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition shocked the world. Doze...
ListenElijah Millgram, "John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
According to an intuitive view, lives are meaningful when they manifest a directedness or instantiate a project such that the disparate events and endeavors “add up to” a life. John Stuart Mill’s ...
ListenJ. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...
ListenJessica Hinchy, "Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Until Jessica Hinchy’s latest book, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), there was no single monograph dedicated to the histo...
ListenAndrew Hobbs, "A Fleet Street In Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900" (Open Book, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The dominance of the London press in the British national media has long overshadowed the presence of local newspapers in Great Britain and the roles they played in their communities. As Andrew Hob...
ListenMaria Nugent, "Captain Cook Was Here" (Cambridge UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Maria Nugent talks about Aboriginal Australians first encounter with Captain Cook at Botany Bay, a violent meeting has come to represent the origin story of Australia’s colonization by Europeans. T...
ListenJorge L. Giovannetti-Torres, "Black British Migrants in Cuba" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres' new book Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) invites readers to ent...
ListenPaul Musselwhite, "Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Early American colonialism is often distinguished by an urban and rural divide. Urban development was a sign of imperial progress. British writers frequently boasted about the size of early Boston ...
ListenKim A. Wagner, "The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How did a Danish historian wind up with a human skull from colonial India in his University of London office? Kim A. Wagner’s The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857(Oxford Un...
ListenRemi Joseph-Salisbury, "Black Mixed-Race Men: Transatlanticity, Hybridity and 'Post-Racial' Resilience" (Emerald, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are the experiences of mixed-race men? In Black Mixed-Race Men: Transatlanticity, Hybridity and 'Post-Racial' Resilience (Emerald Publishing, 2018), Remi Joseph-Salisbury, a Presidential Fell...
ListenJeremy Black, "England in the Age of Shakespeare" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jeremy Black’s impressive new book offers an enormously wide-ranging account of the social, political and religious cultures in which England’s greatest dramatist was formed and found success. Engl...
ListenTyson Reeder, "Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
After emerging victorious from their revolution against the British Empire, many North Americans associated commercial freedom with independence and republicanism. Optimistic about the liberation m...
ListenMatthew Hughes, "Britain's Pacification of Palestine" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his splendid military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine, Britain's Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939...
ListenCharlie Laderman, "Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2019), Charlie Laderman exposes the way that imperial a...
ListenGregg L. Frazer, "God against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy’s Case Against the American Revolution" (UP of Kansas, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Not everyone was convinced by the arguments of patriots during the American revolution. Among those who retained some degree of loyalty to the British crown were the majority of the clergy of the E...
ListenAmanda L. Tyler, "Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Amanda L. Tyler is the author of Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay, published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Habeas Corpus in Wartime is a comprehensive hist...
ListenArik Moran, "Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland" (Amsterdam UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What role did women play in securing power in colonial Himalayan kingdoms? Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland (Amsterdam UP, 2019) specifically documents the key roles played by women ...
ListenJ. C. D. Clark, "Thomas Paine: Britain, America, and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There are few better guides to the “long eighteenth century” that J. C. D. Clark, emeritus professor of history at the University of Kansas, whose sequence of ground-breaking books have contested p...
ListenStephen Alan Bourque, "Beyond the Beach: The Allied War Against France" (Naval Institute Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Did the Allied bombing plan for the liberation of France follow a carefully orchestrated plan, or was it executed on an ad-hoc basis with little concern or regard for collateral damage? How did the...
ListenDavid Philip Miller, "The Life and Legend of James Watt" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For all of his fame as one of the seminal figures of the Industrial Revolution, James Watt is a person around whom many misconceptions congregate. In The Life and Legend of James Watt: Collaboratio...
ListenRobert Crowcroft, "The End is Nigh: British Politics, Power, and the Road to the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Few decades have given rise to such potent mythologies as the 1930s. Popular impressions of those years prior to the Second World War were shaped by the single outstanding personality of that confl...
ListenRachel B. Herrmann, "No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When the British explored the Atlantic coast of America in the 1580s, their relations with indigenous peoples were structured by food. The newcomers, unable to sustain themselves through agricultur...
ListenTita Chico, "The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Can science be seductive? According to Tita Chico, the answer is a resounding yes. In her new book, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment(Stanfor...
ListenHannah Weiss Muller, "Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There is no denying that the public remains fascinated with monarchy. In the United Kingdom, the royal family commands the headlines, but paradoxically they are distant and knowable all at once. Th...
ListenSasha D. Pack, "The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between s...
ListenTim Bouverie, "Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War" (Tim Duggan Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War(Tim Duggan Books, 2019) is a groundbreaking history of the disastrous years of indecision, failed diplomacy and parliamentary infight...
ListenKimberly Alexander, "Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Fashion is universal,” writes my guest Kimberly Alexander in her book Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), “enabling historians across time, place, and cul...
ListenEdward Vallance, "Loyalty, Memory and Public Opinion in England, 1658-1727" (Manchester UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
People value loyalty. We prize it in our dogs. We loyally carry loyalty cards to claim discounts at our favourite stores and coffee shops. We follow sports teams, even when they lose. Loyalty is al...
ListenDavid Green, "The Hundred Years War: A People’s History" (Yale UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The year 1453 marked the end of an intermittent yet seemingly endless series of wars between the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of England that, some four hundred years later, was dubbed the Hun...
ListenJonathan Fennell, "Fighting the People's War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jonathan Fennell’s new book, Fighting the People's War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is an unprecedented, panoramic history of the...
ListenMark Peterson, "The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban...
ListenJeremy Black, "The English Press: A History" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this succinct and brilliantly written one-volume account of the rise and fall of the English press, premier historian Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world, i...
ListenDannel Jones, "An African in Imperial London: The Indomitable Life of A.B.C. Merriman-Labor" (Hurst, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1919 a man named Ohlohr Maigi died of tuberculosis in London, in deep poverty. He had arrived over a decade before in the imperial capital bearing different name, seeking education, fame and for...
ListenKirsteen M. MacKenzie, "The Solemn League and Covenant of the Three Kingdoms and the Cromwellian Union 1643-1663" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kirsteen M. MacKenzie, an historian who has taught for many years at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, has published a definitive account of the relationships between England, Scotland and Irel...
ListenJohn West, "Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion and Politics in Restoration England" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Dryden is often regarded as one of the most conservative writers in later seventeenth-century England, a time-serving “trimmer” who abandoned his early commitments to the English Republic to b...
ListenIan Saxine, "Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (NYU Press, 2019), Ian Saxine, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University,...
ListenRobbie Richardson, "The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture" (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As they explored and struggled to establish settlements in what they called ‘new found lands’, the encounter with the peoples of those lands deeply affected how the British saw themselves. From the...
ListenVeronica Hinke, "The Last Night on the Titanic: Unsinkable Drinking, Dining, and Style" (Regnery History, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Fascination with The Titanic has not faded, though more than 105 years have passed since its tragic sinking when so many lives were lost, and an era of gilded glamor ended. Culinary historian, Ver...
ListenRyan Hanley, "Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c. 1770 -1830" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
To our eyes, eighteenth-century Britain can look like a world of opposites. On one hand everything was new: political parties and a ‘prime’ minister emerged in parliament; their sometime unruly deb...
ListenErika Dyck, "Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today I talked with historian Erika Dyck about Aldous Huxley, Humphry Osmond and their correspondence over a ten year period. Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (...
ListenJames Crossland, "War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853-1914" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Beginning in the mid-1850s, a number of people in Europe and the United States undertook a range of efforts in response to the horrors of war. In his book War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Con...
ListenAdrian Goldsworthy, "Hadrian's Wall" (Basic Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Stretching across the north of England, from coast to coast, are the 73-mile long remnants of a fortification built by the Roman Army during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. It is, as our guest Ad...
ListenJeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, ...
ListenGuy Beiner, "Forgetful Remembering: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Guy Beiner, who is professor of modern history at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has written one of the longest and certainly one of the most extraordinary recent contributions to the historio...
ListenJohn W. Tweeddale, "John Owen and Hebrews: The Foundation of Biblical Interpretation" (T and T Clark, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Owen is one of the most significant seventeenth-century Protestant theologians. He is often discussed by historians of politics and religion in terms of his contributions to the national churc...
ListenDavid Woodbridge, "Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity: The Brethren in Twentieth-Century China" (Brill, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Drawing on new archival resources, and opening up an entirely new research agenda in the field, David Woodbridge has written an outstanding new book. Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity: T...
ListenMax Edelson, "The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence" (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When we think of the history of the British empire we tend to think big: oceans were crossed; colonies grew from small settlements to territories many times larger than England; entire Continents, ...
ListenScott S. Reese, “Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937” (Edinburgh UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Religion and empire are often intertwined. Regarding Muslims there are well known dynasties like the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid, the Ottoman, and many others. But the empire governing the la...
ListenMelanie Ramdarshan Bold, "Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom" (Palgrave, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Does publishing have a diversity problem? In Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom Dr Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, an associate professor at UCL’s Centre for Publishing...
ListenRyan Hackenbracht, "National Reckonings: The Last Judgement and Literature in Milton’s England" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ryan Hackenbracht, who is an associate professor of English at Texas Tech University, has just published one of the most innovative and stimulating discussions of the interplay between literature a...
ListenWilliam Poole, "Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost" (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is widely recognised as the greatest epic poem in the English language – and it is buried in the commentary of thousands of other texts. William Poole, who is Joh...
ListenJeremy Black, "Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World" (Encounter Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Are you tired of the constant refrain from our campus radicals and their bien-pensant allies in the intelligentsia that the United States and the United Kingdom, AKA the American and the British em...
ListenVivi Lachs, "Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London, 1884-1914" (Wayne State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London, 1884-1914 (Wayne State University Press, 2018), Vivi Lachs, social and cultural historian, Yiddishist, performer, and ...
ListenEmily Dawson, "Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who is excluded from science? What is the role of museums in this exclusion? In Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups (Routledge, 2019), Dr Emily Da...
ListenRichard Hingley, "Londinium: A Biography" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From its humble beginnings as a crossing point over the river Thames Londinium grew into the largest city in Roman Britain. In Londinium: A Biography (Routledge, 2018), Richard Hingley draws upon t...
ListenNaomi Pullin, "Female Friends and the Making of Trans-Atlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Naomi Pullin, who is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick, UK, has just published an outstanding account of Female Friends and the Making of Trans-Atlant...
ListenJeremy Black, "Charting the Past: The Historical Worlds of Eighteenth-Century England" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Eighteenth-century England was a place of both the enlightenment and progress: new ideas abounded in science, politics, transportation, commerce, philosophy, religion, and the arts. But even as Eng...
ListenElena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunni...
ListenKathleen Burk, "The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires, 1783-1972" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Throughout modern history, British and American rivalry has gone hand in hand with common interests. Now renown diplomatic historian Professor Kathleen Burk in her newest book, The Lion and the Eag...
ListenBrooke Newman, "A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In an empire built on racial slavery, what roles do blood purity and citizenship play in the creation of subject citizens? This is one of the many questions broached by Dr. Brooke Newman in her new...
ListenKaren Ordahl Kupperman, "Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia(New York University Press, 2019), Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, s...
ListenDiscussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...
ListenJonathan Green, “Green’s Dictionary of Slang” (Hodder Education, 2010) from 2012-01-26T15:55:59
Over the last thirty years, Jonathon Green has established himself as a major figure in lexicography, specialising in English slang. During this time he has accumulated a database of over half a mi...
ListenJonathan Green, “Green’s Dictionary of Slang” (Hodder Education, 2010) from 2012-01-26T15:55:59
Over the last thirty years, Jonathon Green has established himself as a major figure in lexicography, specialising in English slang. During this time he has accumulated a database of over half a mi...
Listen