Podcasts by New Books in Western European Studies

On Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot from 2022-12-20T09:00

In Paris in 1953, one of the strangest and most popular plays of the 20th century premiered, Waiting for Godot, written by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Since the premier, people have been tryin...

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...

On Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote" from 2022-12-16T09:06

Don Quixote was written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. He wrote it in two parts. Part one was published in 1605, and part two ten years later, in 1615. The story is centered around a middle...

On Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" from 2022-12-15T09:00

The French writer Marcel Proust was fascinated by life. But he was even more interested in how we perceive life. In 1908, when he was in his late 30s, he began to write a novel that explored themes...

On Voltaire's "Candide" from 2022-12-14T09:00

Many people made the European Enlightenment, but probably nobody better represents the movement’s spirit than the French writer and philosopher Voltaire. He was a man of letters and strong critic o...

On James Joyce's "Ulysses" from 2022-12-12T09:00

Perhaps more than any other book, Ulysses has the reputation of being difficult—it is dense, allusive, and often hard to follow. But Joyce wasn’t trying to be challenging for its own sake, or becau...

On Hans Blumenberg's "The Legitimacy of the Modern Age" from 2022-12-09T13:00

Those of us living today generally think of ourselves as modern, that we live in modern times, and that we are very different from the people of the past. But there is an important thing that we sh...

On Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" from 2022-11-30T09:00

When he was in his late 30s, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri got himself into some serious political trouble and was exiled from his beloved Florence. While in exile, he wrote one of the world’s g...

On Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" from 2022-11-29T09:00

In 1925, on the French occupied island of Martinique, one of the most prominent voices in post colonial theory was born, Frantz Fanon. He was born to parents of both African and French descent, and...

On 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 ...

On Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" from 2022-11-22T09:23

We moderns often tell ourselves a story that goes something like this: The past was barbaric, especially when it came to punishing criminals or persecuting minorities. Legal punishment used to incl...

On Matteo Maria Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato" from 2022-11-21T09:07

The Italian Renaissance was an era of rebirth in the arts, sciences, engineering, anatomy, and architecture. But also for literature. One of the most influential works from this period was Matteo M...

On Boethius' "The Consolation of Philosophy" from 2022-11-16T09:00

For much of his life, the Roman philosopher Boethius was exceptionally fortunate. But towards the end of his life, his luck ran out. He was accused of treason, thrown in jail, and sentenced to deat...

On 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...

On Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" from 2022-11-11T09:00

The notion of freedom and how to ensure it for all has occupied the minds of many modern thinkers. In his text Elements of the Philosophy of Right, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ...

On Edward Said's "Orientalism" from 2022-11-08T09:00

Beginning in the 17th century, European countries began colonizing countries east of Europe. They imposed their own ideas over local cultures and extracted free labor and resources. One way that Eu...

On Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract" from 2022-11-03T08:00

The 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that humans are born good, but society corrupts them. He was unimpressed with the fixation on wealth that he saw in the French society. In ...

On "Grimms' Fairytales" from 2022-11-02T08:00

You probably already know the story of Snow White—as well as Little Red Riding Hood, Briar Rose, The Frog Prince, and so many others. These tales have a rich history of oral storytelling. They’ve t...

On 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...

On Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" from 2022-10-25T08:00

In her diary, Simone de Beauvoir once wrote “I did not think of myself as a 'woman.' I was me.” Then, in 1949, de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, laying bare the widely accepted gender inequalit...

On Carl von Clausewitz's "On War" from 2022-10-18T08:00

Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War in 1832 after experiencing the Napoleonic wars. The eight books of this text contain Clausewitz’s theory of war. In it, he addresses the relationships between war a...

On Immanuel Kant's "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals" from 2022-10-17T08:00

Immanuel Kant’s early work wasn’t much to write home about. But as his career developed, Kant published incredible works of philosophy that continue to challenge and influence our greatest thinkers...

On Niccolò Machiavelli's "The Prince" from 2022-10-12T08:00

You may know the term “Machiavellian,” but where does the word really come from? Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat who worked firsthand with Italy’s most powerful politicians. He wrote hi...

On Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" from 2022-10-10T08:00

Watching our favorite TV shows and movies today, it’s easy to take the relatable characters and familiar settings for granted. But when Henrik Ibsen debuted his play A Doll’s House, realism was a s...

On Karl Marx's "The Communist Manifesto" from 2022-09-23T08:00

1848 was the Year of Revolutions in Europe. It was also the year that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, proposing a new, classless society. As revolutions erupted ac...

On 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...

On Giovanni Boccaccio’s "The Decameron" from 2022-09-16T08:00

From roughly 1346 to 1353, Europe was paralyzed by the most fatal pandemic in recorded human history; the bubonic plague. The plague killed more than 60% of the total population in Eurasia. This is...

On Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions" from 2022-09-15T08:00

Jean-Jacques Rousseau led an interesting life. He was a philosopher, writer, and music composer in the 18th century. Rousseau believed that society has an enormous influence on human development an...

On "Encyclopédie" from 2022-09-02T08:00

One of the earliest modern encyclopedias was printed in France in the 18th century. Unlike many encyclopedias that came before it, this text was written in French instead of Latin, which was the la...

On Filippo Tomasso Marinetti's "Manifesto of Futurism" from 2022-09-01T08:00

The Manifesto of Futurism was published in 1909, on the front page of Le Figaro, the oldest daily newspaper in France. Its author was Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, a 33-year-old Italian writer who was...

On Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" from 2022-08-31T08:00

Play is an essential part of childhood. But according to German philosopher Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s treatise “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” play was a key part of adulthood, too. In f...

On 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, ...

On 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...

On Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days" from 2022-08-02T08:00

When French author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days in the late 1800s, scheduled global travel was practically science fiction, and 80 days seemed impossibly fast. But his techno-futur...

On Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days" from 2022-08-02T08:00

When French author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days in the late 1800s, scheduled global travel was practically science fiction, and 80 days seemed impossibly fast. But his techno-futur...

Gerry Milligan, "Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature" (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gerry Milligan’s Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2018) takes as its subject the woman warrior in early modern Italy as she was an...

Steven Seegel, “Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire” (U. of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Euro...

Daniel Kilbride, “Being American in Europe: 1750-1860” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Americans go overseas, they know just who they are–Americans. But what was it like for a citizen of the United States to go abroad before there was a clear idea of what an “American” was? This...

Brittany Lehman, "Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1945-1992" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1945-1992 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Brittany Lehman examines the right to education for migrant children in Europe between 1...

David I. Shyovitz, “A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural” (U. Penn Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), David I. Shyovitz, Associate Professor of History, and of Jewish and Isra...

Luuk van Middelaar, “The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the end of the 20th century, it looked like history was being made. After a century that had seen Europe dissolve into an orgy of bloody conflict not once but twice, the continent seemed to have...

Geoffrey Parker, "Emperor: A New Life of Charles V" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From his accession to the Spanish throne in 1516 until his abdication in 1556, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V dominated Europe in a way that no ruler had since Charlemagne. In Emperor: A New Life...

Bruno Perreau, “Queer Theory: The French Response” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At once wonderfully clear and bursting with complexity, the title of Bruno Perreau‘s book, Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford University Press, 2016) is one of my favorites of the past sev...

Gretchen Soderlund, “Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 2013), the new book from the University of Oregon’s Gretchen Soderlund, is about far more tha...

Tyson 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...

Ana Miskovska Kajevska, “Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s (Routledge, 2017), Macedonian researcher, peace-worker, and activist Ana Miskovska Kajevska analyses the way feminists in Bel...

Elizabeth Foster, “Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940” (Stanford University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colon...

Tim Frandy, "Inari Sami Folklore: Stories from Aanaar" (U Wisconsin Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) is rich multivoiced anthology of folktales, legends, joik songs, proverbs, riddles, and other verbal art, this is the ...

Linda Heywood, “Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen” (Harvard University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the capital of the African nation of Angola today stands a statue to Njinga, the 17th century queen of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms. Its presence is a testament to her skills as a diplomat, w...

Samir Chopra, “Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket” (HarperCollins, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains. For the fifth year in a row, no Pakistani players were ...

Jeremy Black, "A Brief History of Italy" (Robinson, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite the Roman Empire's 500-year reign over Europe, parts of Africa and the Middle East, Italy does not have the same long national history as states such as France or England. Divided for much ...

Julie 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...

Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t g...

Mark Roseman, "Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany" (Metropolitan Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What makes some people aid the persecuted while others just stand by? Questions about rescue and resistance have been fundamental to the field of genocide studies since its inception.  Mark Roseman...

Steve 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 ...

Mary Louise Roberts, “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary ...

Jasper Heinzen, "Making Prussians, Raising Germans: A Cultural History of Prussian State-Building after Civil War, 1866-1935" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does civil war shape state building and national identity over the long term? What do the underlying conflicts between Hanoverians and the Prussian state reveal about the course of German histo...

Jeanette Jouili, “Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeanette Jouili‘s fascinating new book Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2015) navigates practices and challenges of living ...

Paul Mojzes, “Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I was a graduate student in the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved into violence. Beginning a dissertation on Habsburg history, I probably knew more about the region than most people in the US about t...

Evdoxios Doxiadis, "State, Nationalism, and the Jewish Communities of Modern Greece" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did minorities fit into the new Greek state during the country’s transition from imperial rule to national sovereignty? How did the relationship between Greece and its Jewish minorities, in par...

Lotta Bjorklund Larsen,”Shaping Taxpayers: Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency” (Berghahn Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do you make taxpayers comply? Lotta Bjorklund Larsen‘s ethnography, Shaping Taxpayers: Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency (Berghahn Books, 2017) offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of ...

John E. Joseph, “Saussure” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachro...

Elizabeth D. Carney, "Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As the wife of a Macedonian king and the mother of three sons who would succeed him, Eurydice played an important role in Macedonia at an important moment in the kingdom’s history. In Eurydice and ...

Samuele F.S. Pardini, “In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen” (Dartmouth, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Ame...

Steven Hill, “Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can the United States learn from Europe? One good answer, says Steven Hill, is social capitalism, a form of economic management that is responsive to markets and productive of broadly-shared p...

Shayne Legassie, "The Medieval Invention of Travel" (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shayne Legassie talks about medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages ...

Timothy D. Walker, “Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms” (W. W. Norton, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I speak with Tim Walker, the author of Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). This book stems from recent interest in Finlan...

Alexandra Hui, “The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that history in a period when musical aesthetics an...

Katie Jarvis, "Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The king’s guards became increasingly nervous as they watched nearly 7,000 individuals march on Versailles on October 5, 1789. The crowd approaching the king’s chateau was overwhelmingly composed o...

Anna Harwell Celenza, “Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Anna Harwell Celenza examines the arrival of jazz in Italy afte...

John Dickie, “Mafia Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Italian Mafias” (Septre, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Dickie is an historian of Italian organized crime who has a fairly unique perspective as he writes in English but is able to read the Italian sources. This allows him to bring new points of vi...

Keir Giles, "Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West" (Chatham House, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From Moscow, the world looks different. It is through understanding how Russia sees the world—and its place in it—that the West can best meet the new Russian challenge to the existing world order. ...

Alec Ryrie, “Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World” (Viking, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

500 years ago, a German monk and professor named Martin Luther started a well-intentioned movement to reform “the Church” (Jesus founded only one, after all). Luther’s object was not to split the C...

Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World an...

Bianca Premo, "The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bianca Premo’s award-winning book The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, makes a powerful yet seemingly ...

Holly Hurlburt, “Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance” (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Caterina Corner lived a life that was composed of a mixture of adventure, power, and tragedy. The daughter of a Venetian patrician and merchant, she was married to the king of Cyprus while barely a...

Lisa Chaney, “Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life....

Jenny Huangfu Day, "Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians in the English-speaking world have long studied how European and American travelers and diplomats conceptualized China, but, especially in recent years, few scholars have attempted to th...

Raz Chen-Morris, “Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility” (Penn State UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Raz Chen-Morris‘s new book traces a significant and surprising notion through the work of Johannes Kepler: in order to account for real physical motions, one has to investigate artificially produce...

Simon Martin, “Sport Italia: The Italian Love Affair with Sport” (I.B. Tauris, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Azzurri, cyclists, boxers, Berlusconi, Balotelli, strapping Fascist men preparing to bear arms, strapping Fascist women preparing to bear children, the shirtless Duce, Ferraris, Vespas, doping scan...

Jesse Cromwell, "The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chocolate – nothing is more irresistible for a decadent treat or a rich drink to warm you on a cold winter’s evening.  In eighteenth-century Venezuela, cacao became a life source for the colony. Ne...

Kate 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...

Sean Cocco, “Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco‘s rich new book uses Vesuvius as a focal point for...

Davide Crippa, The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century" (Birkhäuser, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From 1667 to 1676, a pivotal controversy played out among several mathematical luminaries of the time, partly in the proceedings of the Royal Society but partly in private correspondence. The contr...

Michael E. Stewart, “The Soldier’s Life: Martial Virtues and Manly Romanitas In the Early Byzantine Empire” (Kismet Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The prowess of the Roman empire was imbued with courage and militarism. Symbolised by the combative male soldier, Michael Edward Stewart‘s tool of historical enquiry is masculinity. In his book, Th...

Lawrence M. Principe, “The Secrets of Alchemy” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish? Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book explores these questions and some possible answers t...

Mark Braude, "The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Empire to Exile" (Penguin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I must’ve been a kid when I first heard the palindrome “Able I was ere I saw Elba”. Napoleon didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. “Elba” meant even less. Decades later, I had learned a little more ...

Meredith K. Ray, “Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in 17th-Century Italy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Meredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), that collectively o...

Stanley Payne, “The Spanish Civil War” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Spanish Civil War is one of those events that I have always felt I should know more about. Thanks to Stanley Payne‘s concise, lucid new work on the subject, I feel less that way. I do not exagg...

Evgeny Finkel, "Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust" (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Can there be a political science of the Holocaust? Evgeny Finkel, in his new book Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust(Princeton University Press, 2017), answers Charles King's q...

Mark Braude, “Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle” (Simon and Schuster, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Braude’s Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle (Simon and Schuster, 2016) tells the captivating story of the rise of Monte Carlo as Europe’s most famous casino-resort from...

Joy Wiltenburg, “Crime & Culture in Early Modern Germany” (University of Virginia Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many people complain about sensationalism in the press. If a man slaughters his entire family, a jilted lover kills her erstwhile boyfriend, or a high school student murders several of his classmat...

Susan Jaques, "The Caesar of Paris:  Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession That Shaped An Empire" (Pegasus Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her book, The Caesar of Paris:  Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession That Shaped An Empire (Pegasus Books, 2018), Susan Jaques offers up a richly detailed and researched account ...

Elana Shapira, “Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siecle Vienna” (Brandeis UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siecle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016), Elana Shapira, Lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, examine...

Bernard Kelly, “Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen and the Second World War” (Merrion, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Republic of Ireland (aka The Irish Free State, Eire) declared neutrality during the Second World War. That wasn’t particularly unusual: Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland did too. Yet aro...

Danny Orbach, "Plots Against Hitler" (Eamon Dolan/HMH, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Plots Against Hitler (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Danny Orbach, Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers a profound and complete examination o...

Jeroen Dewulf, “The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves” (U. Press of Mississippi, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) presents the history of the nation’s forgotten Dutch slave com...

E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in ...

M. David Litwa, "How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Did the early Christians believe their myths? Like most ancient—and modern—people, early Christians made efforts to present their myths in the most believable ways. In How the Gospels Became Histor...

Ryan 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 ...

R. M. Douglas, “Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War” (Yale UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I imagine everyone who listens to this podcast knows about the Nazi effort to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling and murdering massive numbers of Slavs, Jews, and Gypsies. The results, ...

Lisa Greenwald, "Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

May ’68 marked a watershed moment in French society, culture, and political life. The feminist movement was no exception. Women took to the streets and meeting halls around the country, challenging...

Matthew James Crawford, “The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean W...

Donald Bloxham, “The Final Solution: A Genocide” (Oxford UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The end of the Cold War dramatically changed research into the Holocaust. The gradual opening up of archives across Eastern Europe allowed a flood of local and regional studies that transformed our...

Michael Lower, "The Tunis Crusade of 1270: A Mediterranean History" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why was a Crusade that was initially meant for Syria end up in Tunis? How did the aspirations of the King of France and the Mamluk Sultan, the King of Sicily and the Hafsid Emir of Tunis, get entan...

Mark Glickman, “Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books” (The Jewish Publication Society, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books (The Jewish Publication Society, 2016), Rabbi Mark Glickman, of Temple Bnai Tikvah in Calgary, examines the massive theft of Jewish books by the Na...

Mary Fulbrook, “A Small Near Town Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well studied and so it’s hard to say anything new about it. Bu...

Is the Idea of "The Enlightenment" Still Useful? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a new podcast of the series ‘Arguing History’, Professor Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world, if not on the entire planet, and renowned Ecclesiastical Histo...

Noah Lederman, “A World Erased: A Grandson’s Search for His Family’s Holocaust Secrets” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Part detective story, part travelogue, Noah Lederman decided to write A World Erased: A Grandson’s Search for his Family’s Holocaust Secrets (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) to find answers to the qu...

Janice Neri, “The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Before the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts.  Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, insects crawled their way to ...

Erin-Marie Legacey, "Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830 (Cornell University Press, 2019), Dr. Erin-Marie Legacey, Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech U...

Stephen Brockmann, “The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959” (Camden House, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen Brockmann’s The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959 (Camden House, 2015) introduces readers to a specific atmosphere–political, cultural, and historical–that acco...

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia” (Harvard University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sanjay Subrahmanyam‘s new book explores translations across texts, images, and cultural practices in the early modern world. Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern...

Robert 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...

Surekha Davies, “Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You find a lot of strange things on late medieval and “Age of Discovery” era maps. Of course there are weird beasts of every sort: dragons, griffins, sea monsters, and sundry multi-headed predators...

Brett Bebber, “Violence and Racism in Football: Politics and Cultural Conflict in British Society, 1968-1998” (Pickering & Chatto, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This past September an independent panel commissioned in 2009 by the British government released its 395-page report on the Hillsborough Stadium disaster of April 1989. The published findings and t...

Elizabeth Otto, "Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this segment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth “Libby” Otto, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies and Executive Director of the Humanities Institute at th...

Devin Naar, “Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford University Press, 2016) Devin Naar delves deep into the archives to produce this intimate and exciting portrait of Salonic...

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, “The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After” (Columbia UP, 2005) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On July 10, 1941, Poles in the town of Jedwabne together with some number of German functionaries herded nearly 500 Jews into a barn and burnt them alive. In 2000, the sociologist Jan Gross publish...

Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost an...

Richard 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...

Pamela O. Long, “Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600” (Oregon State University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pamela O. Long‘s clear, accessible, and elegantly written recent book explores the ways that artisan/practitioners influenced the development of the new sciences in the years between 1400 and 1600....

Peter Jan Margry, "The Miracle of Amsterdam: Biography of a Contested Devotion" (U Notre Dame, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

harles Caspers and Peter Jan Margry's The Miracle of Amsterdam: Biography of a Contested Devotion (University of Notre Dame, 2019) presents a “cultural biography” of a Dutch devotional manifestatio...

Paul Benneworth et al., “The Impact and Future of Arts and Humanities Research” (Palgrave, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the future for Arts and Humanities in Europe? The podcast discusses these questions with Paul Benneworth, one of the authors, along with Magnus Gulbrandsen and Ellen Hazelkorn, of The Impac...

Astrid Eckert, “The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the end of World War II, the Western Allies seized pretty much every official German document they could find and moved the lot out of Germany and often overseas. They had, effectively, taken th...

Katharina Karcher, "Sisters in Arms: Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968" (Berghahn, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Sisters in Arms: Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968 (Berghahn, 2017), Katharina Karcher Lecturer in German at the University of Birmingham, examines a...

Larrie Ferreiro, “Brothers at Arms: Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It” (Knopf, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Was the War for American Independence really about American independence? It depends on who you ask. In his new book, Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Sa...

Jennifer Hall-Witt, “Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880” (University of New Hampshire Press, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I was young I liked to go to bars, especially bars where bands were playing. But when I got there, I often didn’t listen very carefully. And in truth, I wasn’t there to see the band; I was the...

David Stenner, "Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of Morocco’s independence struggle against France and Spain is a complicated one. Because it occurred around the same time of the long-running war for independence in Algeria, it has rece...

Benjamin Martin, “The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benjamin Martin’s The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) examines the attempt by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to forge a European cultural empire out of ...

Minsoo Kang, “Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From artificial talking heads to the famed defecating duck and beyond, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2011) offers readers a...

Jamie Aroosi, "The Dialectical Self: Kierkegaard, Marx, and the Making of the Modern Subject" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jamie Aroosi has written an important book that brings together the theoretical work of Karl Marx and Soren Kierkegaard in a kind of intellectual encounter. Noting the common historical context for...

Federica Goffi, “Time Matter(s): Invention and Reimagination in Built Conservation” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Assistant Professor Federica Goffi fills a blind spot in current architectural theory and practice with this book, Time Matter(s): Invention and Re-Imagination in Built Conservation: The Unfinished...

Ben Shepherd, “Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare (Harvard University Press, 2012), Ben Shepherd, a Reader at Glasgow Caledonian University, offers us insight into the complex and harr...

E. Danto and A. Steiner-Strauss, "Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and the Best Possible School" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss’ edited book, Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and The Best Possible School (Routledge, 2018), stands to alter what has become pra...

Coll 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...

Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were...

Liat Steir-Livny, "Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third Generation Survivors in Israel" (Syracuse UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Holocaust was and remains a central trauma in Israel’s national consciousness. It has found ample expressions in Israeli documentary cinema from 1945 until the present. Third-generation Holocau...

James Kloppenberg, “Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American history at Harvard University. Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (Oxford University Press, ...

Guy Fraser-Sampson, “Cricket at the Crossroads: Class, Colour and Controversy from 1967 to 1977” (Elliott & Thompson, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England. Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appeared that this other pillar of English tradition ...

Donald Reid, "Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968-1981" (Verso Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the summer of 1973, Donald Reid was an undergraduate student who had traveled to France for the first time to work on his Honors thesis in History. It was the “summer of Lip”. Don’s new book, Op...

Kelly Watson, “Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World” (NYU Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kelly Watson’s Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World (New York University Press, 2015) explores the history of the New World through the lens of the c...

Robert Bucholz and Joseph Ward, “London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Not long ago I had a discussion (prompted, I think, by a poll in The Economist) with my colleague about which city on earth could boast that it was the true ‘World City’. We threw around a couple o...

Robert Louis Wilken, "Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of re...

Stevphen Shukaitis, “The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor after the Avant-Garde” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How is the notion of the avant-garde in art relevant today? What can contemporary social movements learn from the Situationists? What is the meaning of artistic value to forms of resistance? These,...

Anne Sebba, “That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor” (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor is more often than not presented as a great love story: she is the woman for whom the King gave up the throne. It’s precisely this oversimplifica...

Caroline Boggis-Rolfe, "The Baltic Story: A Thousand Year History of Its Lands, Sea, and Peoples" (Amberley, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of the littoral nations of the Baltic Sea is like a saga, that genre perfected by those tenacious inhabitants of the rocky shores of this ancient trading corridor.  In it, we meet pirates...

Richard Bourke, “Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Bourke, Professor in the History of Political Thought in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, began developing his history of Edmund Burke’s political thought in 1991. ...

Paul Friedland, “Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment In France” (Oxford University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barri...

Petra Goedde, "The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Earlier histories of the Cold War haven’t exactly been charitable toward the peace activists and pacifists who led peace initiatives. Pacifists in the United States were either simplistic and naïve...

Megan C. Thomas, “Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism” (U. of Minnesota Press, 2012 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Megan Thomas offers a thoroughly researched and closely...

Richard Bessel, “Germany 1945: From War to Peace” (Harper, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just the military that suffered: refugees poured we...

Stephen Hardy and Andrew Holman, "Hockey: A Global History" (U Illinois Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Stephen Hardy, retired professor of kinesiology and affiliate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, and Andrew Holman, professor of history at and the dire...

Stuart Elden “Foucault’s Last Decade” (Polity Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why did Michel Foucault radically recast the project of The History of Sexuality? How did he work collaboratively? What was the influence of Antiquity on his thought? In Foucault’s Last Decade (Pol...

Elizabeth Goldsmith, “The King’s Mistresses” (PublicAffairs, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (PublicAffairs, 2012), the Mazarin sisters w...

Joanne 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...

William Caferro, "Petrarch's War: Florence and the Black Death in Context" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1349 the City-Republic of Florence had just endured a horrific epidemic of bubonic plague, that contagion that became known as the Black Death. Nevertheless, despite the effects upon both their ...

Carsten Schapkow, “Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation” (Lexington Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why were German Jews so fascinated by Iberian Sephardic history? In Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation (Lexington ...

Nancy Hargrove, “T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year” (University of Florida Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. ...

Niklas 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...

Tiffany Florvil and Vanessa Plumly, "Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions, and Histories" (Peter Lang, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Black German Studies is an interdisciplinary field that has experienced significant growth over the past three decades, integrating subjects such as gender studies, diaspora studies, history, and m...

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s rich new book, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) takes readers on a global j...

Sally Bedell Smith, “Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch” (Random House, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media attention focused upon her family. In her new book...

John Tolan, "Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Tolan’s latest book Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today (Princeton UP, 2019) is a fascinating and rich survey of the complex perception...

Sasha 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...

Jessica Greenberg , “After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia” (Stanford University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Greenberg’s After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia (Stanford University Press, 2014) explores a dual tension at work in Serbia in the early 200...

Jim Endersby, “Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In addition to being beautifully written, Imperial Na...

Ewald Nowotny, "Money and Life" (Braumüller Verlag, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In September 2008, Ewald Nowotny joined the governing council of the European Central Bank. Just two weeks later, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in US history - so triggering a global...

Caitlyn Collins, "Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Where in the world do working moms have it best? In her new book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton University Press, 2019), Caitlyn Collins explores how wo...

Caroline Ford, “Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Caroline Ford’s Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Harvard University Press, 2016) explores the roots of French environmental consciousness in the eighteenth and nine...

The NBS Spring Seminar: Understanding European Football from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s springtime in the American Midwest. The playoffs for the NBA title and hockey’s Stanley Cup are moving into the later rounds, and the new baseball season has already produced history-making pe...

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, "Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A startling look at the unexpected places where violent hate groups recruit young people. Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing f...

Daniel Nemser, "Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico" (U Texas Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico(University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spati...

Emile Chabal, “A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emile Chabal’s A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an in-depth analysis of the languages and preoccupations of French civi...

Philip Gounev, “Corruption and Organized Crime in Europe” (Taylor and Francis, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are talking with Philip Gounev (co-edited with Vincenzo Ruggiero) about his new book Corruption and Organized Crime in Europe (Taylor and Francis, 2012). He is the co-author of this book w...

Grégory Quin, "Des Réseaux et des Hommes: Participation et Contribution de la Suisse à l’Internationalisation du Sport (1912-1972)" (Éditions Alphil, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Grégory Quin, maître d’enseignement et de recherche à l’Institut des sciences du sport de l’Université de Lausanne, and he is the author and editor of Des Réseaux et des Homm...

Jeremy F. Walton, "Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The social history of Turkey across the twentieth century has produced a tension between state governance and religion. This history informs and shapes modern subjects as they try to live out an au...

Anders 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...

Monica Black, “Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over 2.5 million Germans died as a result of World War I, or about 4% of the German population at the time. Somewhere between 7 and 9 million Germans died as a result of World War II, or between 8%...

Alexander Lee, "Humanism and Empire: The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Renaissance humanists and the Holy Roman Empire haven’t mixed well in most scholarship. Humanists were supposed to be learned exponents of liberty. Often employed by Italian city-states, their civi...

Tim 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...

Todd Green, “The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West” (Fortress Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Islamophobia, both as a term and concept, has a storied and complicated history, and understanding its many layers in our current historical moment remains important for any number of audiences and...

Randy Roberts, “A Team for America: The Army-Navy Game That Rallied a Nation” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Two weeks from now the National Football League will hold its annual draft of college football players. For the league’s teams, the draft is the chance to re-stock their rosters with fresh young ta...

M. 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...

Jeanette M. Fregulia, "A Rich and Tantalizing Brew: A History of How Coffee Connected the World" (U Arkansas Press, 2019)) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Jeanette M. Fregulia about the movements of coffee beans, coffee drinking, and coffee houses from Ethiopia and Yemen, across the Mediterranean regio...

Peter Trawny, “Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Peter Trawny, professor of philosophy and founder and director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the U...

Carolina Armenteros, “The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854” (Cornell UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Wester...

Lissette 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...

Jeffrey T. Zalar, "Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Popular conceptions of Catholic censorship, symbolized above all by the Index of Forbidden Books, figure prominently in secular definitions of freedom. To be intellectually free is to enjoy access ...

Kieko Matteson, “Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kieko Matteson’s Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an impressive study of the economic and political vitality o...

Philip Oltermann, “Keeping Up With the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters” (Faber and Faber, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few people are in a better position to assess different countries and cultures than those caught between them. So it is with Philip Oltermann: a German journalist who came to England while a teenag...

Anthony L. Gardner, "Stars with Stripes: The Essential Partnership between the European Union and the United States" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If the US is – in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – the "indispensible nation" then the economic, democratic and institutional alliance between the US and the EU is the “e...

Edward 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...

Jack Jacobs, “The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Jack Jacobs, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center, investigate...

Richard Wilson, “Inside the Divide: One City, Two Teams, the Old Firm” (Canongate, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alabama-Auburn. Maple Leafs-Canadiens. Boca Juniors-River Plate. Carlton-Collingwood.Fenerbahce-Galatasaray. Great rivalries are the catalysts of national sporting cultures. They are the high po...

Noel Malcolm, "Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sir Noel Malcolm’s captivating new book, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), tells the story of Western European fa...

David 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...

Paul M. Cobb, “The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual ...

David Edgerton, “Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

My grandfather joined up when the Second World War broke out, but he was soon returned to civvy street as he was much more valuable employing his mechanic’s skills to fight the Nazis from a factory...

D. Bilak and T. Nummedal, "Furnace and Fugue. A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s 'Atalanta fugiens' (1618)" (U Virginia Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engag...

Anthony Kaldellis, "Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though commonly used today to identify a polity that lasted for over a millennium, the label “Byzantine empire” is an anachronism imposed by more recent generations. As Anthony Kaldellis explains i...

Mitchell Yockelson, “Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in WWI” (NAL Caliber, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I (NAL Caliber, 2016), National Archives historian and forensic archivist Mitchell Yockelson reapprai...

Jorg Muth, “Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940” (UNT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week we’re continuing our focus on the Second World War, as our guest author, Jorg Muth, chats about his recent book Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Fo...

James 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...

Jane Hooper, "Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600-1800" (Ohio UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Madagascar lies so close to the African coast--and so near the predictable wind system of the Indian Ocean--that it’s easy to overlook the island, the fourth largest in the world, when talking abou...

John Freed, “Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For all of his importance as a medieval ruler, there are surprisingly few biographies in English of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa (c. 1122-1190). John Freed fills this gap with his new bo...

Carolyn Burke, “No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf” (Knopf, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s. And yet, so of...

Martyn Rady, "The Habsburgs: To Rule the World" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (Basic Books, 2020), Martyn Rady, Masaryk Professor of Central European History at University College London, tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it ...

Francesca Trivellato, "The Promise and Peril of Credit" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and P...

Vanessa Ogle, “The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreform...

Robert Holland, “Blue Water Empire: the British in the Mediterranean since 1800” (Penguin, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I have always found something distinctly ‘un-British’ about the Mediterranean. I grew up thinking of the British empire – and British spirit – as being founded upon the open ocean: unconfined, stor...

Stefan Bauer, "The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stefan Bauer has written an outstanding study of one of the most important Catholic historians in early modern Europe. Bauer, who has just taken up a new position teaching history at Warwick Univer...

Cathal J. Nolan, "The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, To...

Daniel Jutte, “The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400-1800” (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his expansive The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400-1800 (Yale University Press, 2015), Daniel Jutte suggests new ways of understanding the scientific revolution...

David Stahel, “Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East” (Cambridge UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week’s podcast is an interview with David Stahel. I will be talking to him about his 2009 work, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2009). One of...

K. Grenier and A. Mushal, "Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) explores commemorative practices as they developed in the nineteenth century. The editors of the vol...

Daniel Hershenzon, "The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean" (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For hundreds of years, people living on the coasts of  the Mediterranean Sea enslaved one another. Moslems from North Africa captured Italians, French, and Spaniards; and North African Moslems were...

Jessa Crispin, “The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Biography is a genre of largely unexamined power: a literary field that preserves stories of lived lives and, through them, perpetuates notions that there are certain ways lives can be lived. This ...

Andy Neill, “Had Me a Real Good Time: Faces Before, During, and After” (Omnibus, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Had Me a Real Good Time: Faces Before, During, and After (Omnibus 2011) Andy Neill provides a detailed account of Faces, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed groups of the early seve...

Bernice 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...

Demetra Kasimis, "The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Demetra Kasimis’s new book, The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2018) interrogates the role and unstable place of the metics (metoikoi) in Athe...

Ethan Katz, “The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Ethan Katz examines and interrogates Jewish-Muslim relations from 1914 to the present. ...

Andrew Ritchie, “Quest for Speed: A History of Early Bicycle Racing 1868-1903” (Cycle Publishing, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As several guests on this podcast have told us, sports have been fundamentally connected with the major developments of modern history: urbanization, class conflict, imperialism, political repressi...

Ben Vinson III, "Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since its 2017 publication, Ben Vinson III's book Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Cambridge University Press) has opened new dimensions on race in Latin Americ...

Norman Eisen, "The Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House" (Crown, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As we’ve previously discussed, there are a lot of books about democracy filling book store and library shelves right now. Norman Eisen could have written a book in the vein of Daniel Ziblatt and St...

Ayten Gundogdu, “Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does one “rethink and revise the key concepts of Hannah Arendt’s political theory in light of the struggles of asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants” (207)? In her new book Righ...

Simon Winder, “Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I was fourteen I was faced with a difficult choice. I was dreadful at languages but knew that I had another two years of brain-aching pain ahead of me full of verb tables and conjugations. The...

Julie Hardwick, "Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Young women and men sought out each other’s company in the workshops, cabarets, and streets of Old Regime Lyon, and evidence of these relationships lingers in documents and material objects conserv...

Timothy A. Sayle, "Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization regularly appears in newspapers and political science scholarship. Surprisingly, historians have yet to devote the attention that the organization’s history m...

Sven-Erik Rose, “Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848” (Brandeis UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848 (Brandeis University Press, 2014), Sven-Erik Rose, Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis, explores how Jewish i...

Gerald Steinacher, “Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going into that cavity. That nerve’s already dying.”). The...

Mira L. Siegelberg, "Statelessness: A Modern History" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her book, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press, 2020), Mira L. Siegelberg traces the history of the concept of statelessness in the years following the First and Second Worl...

James 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...

Ana Foteva, “Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe” (Peter Lang, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Starting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th throu...

David Ciarlo, “Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a native-born American, you’re probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben (precooked rice), and Rastus (oatmeal)–commercial icons all. They were co-oped in whole or par...

Stephen 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...

John J. Curley, "Global Art and the Cold War" (Laurence King Publishers, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It was the passionate amateur painter, Winston Churchill, who introduced one of the Cold War’s key metaphors: The Iron Curtain. As John J. Curley argues in Global Art and the Cold War (Laurence Kin...

Stefan Ihrig, “Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At least twice in past interview descriptions I’ve used the famous phrase attributed to Hitler: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” To be honest, I couldn’t have to...

Annette Timm, “The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin” (Cambridge UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many of us know that Nazi regime tried to control Germans’ fertility: some people should reproduce more, according to the National Socialists, and some should reproduce less or not at all. Policies...

Jill Richards, "The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (Columbia UP 2020), Jill Richards radically rewrites our understanding of first-wave feminism by demonstra...

Adrian 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...

Kenyon Zimmer, “Immigrants Against the State” (U of Illinois Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (University of Illinois, 2015), Kenyon Zimmer, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas, Arlington, examin...

Ronald Reng, “A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke” (Yellow Jersey Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On November 10, 2009, Robert Enke stepped in front of an express train at a crossing in the German village of Eilvese. At age 32, Robert left behind a young family: he and his wife, Teresa, had jus...

Patrick Honohan, "Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For readers – including non-economists – who want to get to grips with the nature and scale of the last financial crisis, how it was managed and mismanaged, and its particular impact on a small, op...

Jeremy 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, ...

Jeremy Ahearne, “Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did two right wing presidents use culture to govern France? In Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Jeremy Ahearne, a Professor of French Stu...

David Potter, “The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Victor’s Crown brings to vivid life the signal role of sport in the classical world. Ranging over a dozen centuries–from Archaic Greece through to the late Roman and early Byzantine empires–Dav...

Jeremy Black, "The Holocaust: History and Memory" (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The event that is commonly labeled as the ‘Holocaust’, was one of the most horrific of the Twentieth Century. It is also one of the most popularly discussed events of both the past and the current ...

Stephen Fritz, "The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader (Yale University Press, 2018), Stephen Fritz professor of history at East Tennessee State University reexamines Hitler as a military ...

Daniel 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...

Timothy Nunan, “Carl Schmitt, ‘Writings on War'” (Polity Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was the author of numerous influential books and essays on political theory, law, and other subjects. In Carl Schmitt: Writings on War (Polity Press, 2011), Rhodes Scholar ...

Sheri Berman, "Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the end of the twentieth century, many believed the story of European political development had come to an end. Modern democracy began in Europe, but for hundreds of years it competed with vario...

Kris Lane, "Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1545, a native Andean prospector hit pay dirt on a desolate red mountain in highland Bolivia. There followed the world's greatest silver bonanza, making the Cerro Rico or "Rich Hill" and the Imp...

Kristin Ross, “Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune” (Verso, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One hundred and forty-five years ago this week, the French state massacred thousands of its own people during the semaine sanglante (bloody week) of the Paris Commune. Kristin Ross’ Communal Luxury...

Edith Sheffer, “Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. Yo...

Cory C. Brock, "Orthodox Yet Modern: Herman Bavinck’s Use of Friedrich Schleiermacher" (Lexham Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cory C. Brock has published an exciting new book on one of the most important Dutch Reformed theologians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Herman Bavinck negotiated his conser...

Toby Green, "A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (...

Todd Endelman, “Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton University Press, 2015), Todd Endelman looks across three centuries and on both sides of the Atla...

Andrew Curran, “The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history o...

Rogers M. Smith, "That Is Not Who We Are!: Populism and Peoplehood" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rogers M. Smith, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a new book on the connection between our understanding of peop...

Harold J. Cook, "The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Harold J. Cook talks about the travels and trials of the young Descartes, a man who spent as much time traveling and fighting as he did studying philosophy. Cook is John F. Nickoll Professor of His...

Nicole Rudolph, “At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort” (Berghahn Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicole Rudolph‘s At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort (Berghahn Books, 2015) contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the three decades after 1945 known as...

Kay Schiller and Christopher Young, “The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This past summer Germany hosted the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The 32 matches drew more than 800,000 fans, while the total number of foreign tourists visiting Germany increased by nine per cent o...

Adriaan C. Neele, "Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706): Text, Context, and Interpretation" (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adriaan Neele, who is director of the doctoral programme and Professor of Historical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, has edited an outstanding collection of essays on Petrus van ...

Houri Berberian, "Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her newest book, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds (University of California Press, 2019), Dr. Houri Berberian uses a tra...

Michael Broer, “Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny” (Pegasus, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most biographers writing about the life and achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte have focused on his dramatic personality or his military campaigns. In Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (Pegasus, 2015) th...

Heather Augustyn, “Ska: An Oral History” (McFarland, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Before reggae there was rock steady, and before that, ska,” writes Cedella Marley in the foreword to Heather Augustyn’s 2010 book Ska: An Oral History (McFarland, 2010). By way of interviews with ...

John Connelly, "From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Connelly’s new book – From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) – is an encyclopedic but lively narrative that captivates both those familiar wi...

Caitlín Eilís Barrett, "Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Eilís Bar...

Ayesha Ramachandran, “Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At what point does the world end? More importantly, how did this idea of a whole, unified world emerge to begin with? In Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago ...

Elizabeth Heineman, “Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I...

Geoffrey Plank, "Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For the people of the Dawnland, they were floating islands. The sails resembled clouds, and the men gathered on deck looked like bears. When Europeans came ashore, whether Danes in what would becom...

Jacob Lee, "Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

America’s waterways were once the superhighways of travel and communication. Coursing through a central line across the landscape, with tributaries connecting the South to the Great Plains and the ...

Robert Holub, “Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2016), Robert Holub, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of German at Ohio State University, evalua...

Michael Neiberg, “Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I” (Harvard University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As we close in on the centennial of the First World War, no doubt there will be a flood of new interpretations and “hidden histories” of the conflict. Many books will certainly promise much, but in...

Marlene Wind, "The Tribalization of Europe: A Defence of our Liberal Values" (Polity, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The European Union is arguably facing the greatest existential threat in its history. One of its big four member states has left and the main opposition parties in France and Italy flirt with leavi...

Richard 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...

Ingrid Carlberg, “Raoul Wallenberg: The Biography” (MacLehose Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What makes a person? What makes an act heroic? And what determines a person’s fate? These are the questions driving the narrative in Ingrid Carlberg‘s new book, Raoul Wallenberg: The Biography (Mac...

Tony Collins, “A Social History of English Rugby Union” (Routledge, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most modern sports have some creation myth that usually links them to an almost-sacred place of origin. Baseball has its Cooperstown. Golf its St. Andrews. Basketball its Springfield College. If yo...

Alison 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. ...

Robert Matzen, "Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II" (GoodKnight Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Audrey Hepburn was justly known for her long acting career, yet her early life is largely unknown. In his book, Robert Matzen describes how she lived during the World War II period in Nazi-occupied...

John M. Efron, “German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton University Press, 2016), John M. Efron, Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Berkeley, examines the special ...

Konrad H. Jarausch, “Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front” (Princeton University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Konrad H. Jarausch, whose varied and important works on German history have been required reading for scholars for several decades, has published Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters...

Edgardo Pérez Morales, "No Limits to Their Sway: Cartagena’s Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions" (Vanderbilt UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In No Limits to Their Sway: Cartagena’s Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions (Vanderbilt UP, 2018), Edgardo Pérez Morales investigates the hemispheric connections betwe...

Margaret C. Jacob, "The Secular Enlightenment" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Secular Enlightenment by Professor Margaret C. Jacob, has been called a major new history on how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives. It’s a panoramic account of the radical w...

Michael Goebel, “Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Goebel‘s Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) thinks globally while focusing on the local, everyday histories...

Christopher Krebs, “A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich” (Norton, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Being a historian is a bit of a slog: years in graduate school, more years in dusty libraries and archives, and even more years teaching students who sometimes don’t seem interested in learning wha...

Roman Deininger, "Markus Söder: The Shadow Chancellor" (Droemer Knauer, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Next year, Germany goes to the polls. For the first time in 15 years, Angela Merkel will not be a candidate for chancellor. Although a leadership election is underway inside Merkel’s Christian Demo...

Craig Benjamin, "Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era, 100 BCE-250 CE" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the late second century BCE, a series of trading route developed between China in the east and Rome’s empire in the west. Craig Benjamin’s Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era, 1...

Seth Kimmel, “Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his path clearing new book, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Seth Kimmel, Assistant Professor of Latin American and...

Matthias Strohn, “The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthias Strohn‘s The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an important challenge to ...

Kenneth Austin, "The Jews and the Reformation" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kenneth Austin, who teaches history at the University of Bristol, UK, is well-known for his work on Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe. His new book, The Jews and the Reformation (Yale Univers...

Jeremy 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...

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, “Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Suzanne Brown-Fleming suggests that most people think the archives of the International Tracing Service is largely a list of names and addresses. I was one of these people until I read her excellen...

Matthew Kelly, “Finding Poland: From Tavistock to Hruzdowa and Back Again” (Jonathan Cape, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Very little illustrates history as well as the personal story. For all of the wars, deportations and suffering of the mid Twentieth Century, it’s only when there are real people that the figures co...

Jonathan Robinson, "Rights at the Margins: Historical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives" (Brill, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The essays in Rights at the Margins: Historical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (Brill) explore the ways rights were available to those in the margins of society. By tracing pivotal judicial ...

Sigrid Lien, "Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian-American Migration" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In one of history’s largest migrations, hundreds of thousands of Norwegians immigrated to North American during the 1800s and early 1900s. In addition to letters sent home, Norwegian-Americans ofte...

Daniella Doron, “Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation” (Indiana UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, looks at the post-W...

Adam Hochschild, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918” (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, the day on which we remember those who have fought and died in the service of our country. It’s fitting, then, that we are talking to Adam Hochschil...

Despina Stratigakos, "Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (Princeton University Press, 2020), Despina Stratigakos investigates the Nazi occupation of Norway. Between 1940 ...

Christian Goeschel, "Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance (Yale University Press, 2018), Christian Goeschel, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Manches...

Robert Priest, “The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Priest‘s The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a fascinating book about another fascinating book: Erne...

Jonathan Steinberg, “Bismarck: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this question. He was sure that there was a ki...

Kris Alexanderson, "Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kris Alexanderson offers a revealing portrait of the Dutch Empire repositions our understan...

Joel Elliot Slotkin, "Sinister Aesthetics: The Appeal of Evil in Early Modern Literature" (Palgrave, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why did creative writers in early modern England write so forcefully about the relationship between aesthetics and morality? How did they imagine creative work to reflect religious categories and m...

James 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 ...

Charles Emmerson, “The Future History of the Arctic: How Climate, Resources and Geopolitics are Reshaping the North, and Why it Matters to the World” (Vintage, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I don’t know how many young boys develop a fascination with the world from having a map of the world hung above their beds, but this certainly fits in with the experiences of both Charles Emmerson ...

Jeremy 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...

Kurt Raaflaub, "The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works" (Pantheon, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

That the Roman leader Gaius Julius Caesar is so well remembered today for his achievements as a general is largely due to his skills as a writer. In The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works (...

Kennetta 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...

Robert Citino, “Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942” (UP of Kansas, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Citino is one of a handful of scholars working in German military history whose books I would describe as reliably rewarding. Even when one quibbles with some of the details of his argument,...

Carolyn J. Dean, "The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carolyn J. Dean’s The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the cultural history of the idea of the “witness to genocide” in Western Europe an...

Stéphane Henaut and Jeni Mitchell, "A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment" (The New Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the cassoulet that won a war to the crêpe that doomed Napoleon, from the rebellions sparked by bread and salt to the new cuisines forged by empire, the history of France is intimately entwined...

Justin E. H. Smith, “Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Justin E. H. Smith‘s new book is a fascinating historical ontology of notions of racial difference in the work of early modern European writers. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in ...

Erik Jensen, “Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities, therefore, are sick or healthy depending...

Helmut Walser Smith, "Germany: A Nation in its Time" (Liveright, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his groundbreaking 500-year history entitled Germany: A Nation in its Time (Liveright, 2020), Helmut Walser Smith challenges traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past, revealing a nat...

Paul J. Kosmin, "Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, the Seleucid kings ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia to Anatolia, Armenia to the Persian Gulf. In a radical move to impose uni...

Stefan Ihrig, “Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2014), historian Stefan Ihrig examines the history of Mustafa Kemal and Republican Turkey through the interpretive lens of Nazi politic...

Hans Kundnani, “Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust” (Columbia UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s pretty common in American political discourse to call someone a “fascist.” Everyone knows, however, that this is just name-calling: supposed fascists are never really fascists–they are just pe...

Sandra Young, "The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge" (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Early modern geographers and compilers of travel narratives drew on a lexicon derived from cartography’s seemingly unchanging coordinates to explain human diversity. Sandra Young’s inquiry into the...

Sheilagh Ogilvie, "The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Guilds were prominent in medieval and early modern Europe, but their economic role has seldom been studied. In The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2019), Sheilagh...

Caroline 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...

Benjamin Binstock, “Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice” (Routledge, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ben Binstock‘s Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (Routledge, 2009) is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. It does what all good history books s...

J. Herbst and S. Lovegrove, "Brexit And Financial Regulation" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The UK’s transition from legally withdrawing from the EU to leaving the union’s single market will come to an end at midnight on December 31 with no successor trade agreement yet in place. For the ...

Margaret Arnold, "The Magdalene in the Reformation" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mary Magdalene’s story of conversion from sinner to saint is one of Christianity’s most compelling and controversial stories. The identity of this woman, but more likely women, has been disputed si...

Carin 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...

J. E. Lendon, “Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins” (Basic, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Reading J. E. Lendon’s writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010) took me back to the eventful days of my youth at Price Elementary School, or rather to the large yard...

Rachel Mesch, "Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press), Rachel Mesch reads the biographies and work of three writers who did not conform to the gender norm...

Discussion 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...

Timothy Snyder, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” (Tim Duggan Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s rare when an academic historian breaks through and becomes a central part of the contemporary cultural conversation. Timothy Snyder does just this with his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as ...

Catherine Epstein, “Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests ...

Jeff Schauer, "Wildlife between Empire and Nation in 20th-Century Africa" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The protection of African wildlife enjoys the support of large numbers of individuals and institutions throughout the world. In Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth Century Africa (Palgr...

Seth Bernard, "Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 B...

Nicholas Walton, “Genoa, ‘La Superba’: The Rise and Fall of a Merchant Pirate Superpower” (Hurst, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Italians have a reputation for being rather, well, ineffectual. Everyone ‘knows’ that Italian trains don’t run on time unless Italy is ruled by a bald, bombastic, bully. And of course historians wi...

Joyce Salisbury, “The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages” (Routledge, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I have three cats. They have names (Fatty, Mini, and Koshka). They live in my house. I feed them, take them to the vet, and love them. When they die, I’ll be really sad. After having read Joyce Sal...

Jeremy Black, "A Brief History of the Mediterranean" (Little Brown, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy Black, the prolific professor of history at Exeter University, has published A Brief History of the Mediterranean (Little Brown, 2020), to offer readers an overview of this sphere from pre-h...

Prakash 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...

Erik Linstrum, “Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016), Erik Linstrum examines how the field of psychology was employed in the service of empire. Linstrum explores the ...

Nell Irvin Painter, “The History of White People” (Norton, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We in the West tend to classify people by the color of their skin, or what we casually call “race.” But, as Nell Irvin Painter shows in her fascinating new book The History of White People (Norton,...

Olli Rehn, "Walking the Highwire: Rebalancing the European Economy in Crisis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Walking the Highwire: Rebalancing the European Economy in Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) tells the story of the Eurozone’s crisis from the perspective of an insider who now sits on the European ...

Jennifer Ronyak, "Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Lied is one of the most important genres of nineteenth-century Romantic music, and one of the most intriguing. Balanced between public and private performance, an expression of both poetic and ...

Elizabeth M. Williams, “The Politics of Race in Britain and South Africa” (I. B. Tauris, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1951 a West-Indian seaman was killed in Cape Town by two white policemen. His murder had initiated protests and demonstrations in the Caribbean and in London. This, tells us Dr. Elizabeth M. Wil...

Thomas Weber, “Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that more scholarly attention has probably been paid to Hitler ...

S. Grayzel and T. Proctor, "Gender and the Great War" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this week episode of “New Books in History,” we’ll discuss Gender and the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2017) with editors Sue Grayzel and Tammy Proctor, focusing on ideas about how to tea...

Alexander Langlands, "Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts" (Norton, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alexander Langlands is a British archaeologist, historian, writer, and broadcaster.  His most recent book, Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, was published b...

Sarah Maza, “Violette Noziere: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris” (U. of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On August 21, 1933, the teenaged Violette Noziere attempted to kill both her parents. At first, seemingly so clearcut, the case ultimately came to be characterized by a “troubling ambiguity” that ...

Joe Maiolo, “Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941” (Basic Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 (Basic Books, 2010), Joe Maiolo proposes (I want to write “demonstrates,” but please read the book and judge for yourself) two rema...

Steven Shapin, "The Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (Universi...

Chet Van Duzer, "Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chet Van Duzer, an accomplished historian of cartography, trains his sight in this book on one uniquely important map produced in early modern Europe. The 1491 world map by Henricus Martellus has l...

Peter Thorsheim, “Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press 2015), Peter Thorsheim explores the role of waste and recycling in Britain under conditions of to...

Valerie Hebert, “Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg” (University Press of Kansas, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Clausewitz famously said war was the “continuation of politics by other means.” Had he been unfortunate enough to witness the way the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front in World War II, he might...

David Bressoud, "Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas (Princeton UP, 2019) takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story of how calculus evolved into the subject we kno...

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, "The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a sweeping examination of the key ideas that have infused American society. Moving acros...

Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment” (Cambridge UP, 2015 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it becom...

Jeffrey H. Jackson, “Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the late 19th century, French sociologist Emile Durkheim warned the world about spreading “normlessness” (anomie). He claimed that modern society, and particularly life in concentrated urban-ind...

Jered Rubin, "Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge UP, 2020) addresses one of the big questions in economics and economic history: why did the modern economy...

Geraldine 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 ...

Kim Wunschmann, “Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps” (Harvard University Press 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), Kim Wunschmann, DAAD Lecturer in Modern European History and a Member of the Centre for Ger...

Gary Bruce, “The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to the West (which they did), so they naturally to...

Colin Rose, "A Renaissance of Violence: Homicide in Early Modern Italy" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Colin Rose, Assistant Professor of History at Brock University in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, Canada, about his new book, A Renaissance ...

Matthew 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...

Maud S. Mandel, “Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict” (Princeton University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014), Maud S. Mandel, Dean of the College at Brown University, challenges the view that rising anti-Semitism in Fr...

Ruth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century” (Henry Holt, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every ...

Pamila Gupta, "Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pamila Gupta’s Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020), takes a unique approach to examining decolonization processes across L...

Daniel Unowsky, “The Plunder: The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia” (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Unowsky's book isn't about a genocide or other incident of mass violence.  Instead, The Plunder examines a series of riots against Jews in Habsburg Galicia in the year 1898.  Unowsky tries t...

Stefan Berger, “The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A historiographical paradigm opened in the late 1970s with groundbreaking works on nationalism. To a large extent these were constructivist interpretations, which drew heavily on literary criticism...

Fearghal McGarry, “The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sometimes when you win you lose. That’s called a Pyrrhic victory. But sometimes when you lose you win. We don’t have a name for that (at least as far as I know). But we might call it an “Easter Ris...

Marion Kaplan, "Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marion Kaplan's riveting book, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (Yale University Press) describes the dramatic experiences of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler’s regime and ...

Jeremy 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...

Yarimar Bonilla, “Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As overseas departments of France, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are frequently described as anomalies within the postcolonial Caribbean. Yet in reality, as Yarimar Bonilla argues in her...

Jeffrey Reznick, “John Galsworthy and the Disabled Soldiers of the Great War” (Manchester UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of the most popular and famous British writers of th...

Paul De Grauwe, "Economics of Monetary Union" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

First published in 1992 before the creation of the euro, Paul De Grauwe’s Economics of Monetary Union (Oxford University Press, 2020) has become a standard text for undergraduates seeking to unders...

Stefanos Geroulanos, "Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present" (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does it mean to do a “microhistory” of a concept? Stefanos Geroulanos pursues just such a project in the 22 chapters of Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (Stanf...

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria” (U of Chicago, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago, 2014), Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, takes a new perspe...

Andrew Donson, “Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914-1918” (Harvard UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I was a little kid during the Vietnam War. It was on the news all the time, and besides my uncle was fighting there. I followed it closely, or as closely as a little kid can. I never thought for a ...

Patrice Gueniffey, "Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and History" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of France’s most famous historians compares and contrasts the two most famous French exemplars of political and military leadership of the past two-hundred and fifty years to make the case that...

Robin Wallace, "Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery" (UChicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Music lovers and researchers alike have long been fascinated by the story of Ludwig van Beethoven who became profoundly deaf as an adult and could not hear some of his most famous compositions incl...

Nicholas Stargardt, “The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945” (Basic Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In all of the thousands upon thousands of books written about Nazi Germany, it’s easy to lose track of some basic questions. What did Germans think they were fighting for? Why did they support the ...

Hilary Earl, “The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History” (Cambridge UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hitler caused the Holocaust, that much we know (no Hitler, no Holocaust). But did he directly order it and, if so, how and when? This is one of the many interesting questions posed by Hilary Earl i...

Richard Breitman, "The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies"(Oxford Academic/USHMM) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The?Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies is turning twenty-five. One of the first academic journals focused on the study of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies,?it has been one of a few journal...

Kevin Ingram, "Converso Non-Conformism in Early Modern Spain: Bad Blood and Faith from Alonso de Cartagena to Diego Velázquez" (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It was a delight to catch up with Kevin Ingram, professor of history at Saint Louis University, Madrid, to discuss his very impressive new book. Converso Non-Conformism in Early Modern Spain: Bad B...

Jerome Bourdon, “Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle” (Presses des Mines, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jerome de Bourdon‘s Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle (Presses des Mines, 2014) is a revised version of a book that first appeared in 1990. This edition has been revamped, and includes a new...

Alan E. Steinweis, “Kristallnacht 1938” (Harvard UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, thou...

Ananya Chakravarti, "The Empire of Apostles" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ananya Chakravarti’s The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and The Imagination of Empire in Modern Brazil and India (Oxford University Press), recovers the religious roots of Europe's firs...

Zeb Tortorici, "Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Duke University Press, 2018), Zeb Tortorici analyzes a vast corpus of documents in order to understand how sex acts that were conside...

Am Johal, “Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene” (Atropos Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The French philosopher Alain Badiou is not best known for his engagement with ecological matters per se. Badiou’s insights regarding being, truth, and political militancy are, however, highly relev...

Toby Lester, “The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name” (Free Press, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Lester‘s fascinating and terrifically readable new book The Fourth...

Costas Lapavitsas, "The Left Case Against the EU" (Polity, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight f...

Sam 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...

Roland Clark, “Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania” (Cornell UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015) is an in-depth study of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, one of the largest and longest lasting fasci...

Stephen Kotkin, “Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment” (Modern Library, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why did communism collapse so rapidly in Eastern Europe in 1989? The answer commonly given at the time was that something called “civil society,” having grown mighty in the 1980s, overthrew it. I’v...

David Tavárez, "Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America" (U Colorado Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor David Tavárez’s edited volume, Words & Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2017), is a collection of eleven e...

David L. Hoffmann, "The Stalin Era" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book The Stalinist Era(Cambridge University Press, 2018), David L. Hoffmann focuses on the myriad ways in which Stalinist practices had their origins in World War I (1914-1918) and Russi...

Claire McLisky, et al., “Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives” (Palgrave McMillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Published by Palgrave in 2015, Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives brings together scholars from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, the US, Germany, and Denmark. Through ...

Michaela Hoenicke, “Know Your Enemy: American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945” (Cambridge UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To Americans, Hitler et al. were a confusing bunch. The National Socialists were Germans, and Germans had a reputation for refinement, industry, and order. After all, many Americans were of German ...

Joshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronom...

Jodi Campbell, "At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain" (U Nebraska Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jodi Campbell is Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She has written extensively on Spanish drama, royal history and women’s history. Her first book was published by Ashgate in 2006...

Malick Ghachem’s “The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Malick Ghachem‘s recent book The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012) takes a long look at Haiti’s colonial history on the legal questions around slavery. In par...

Padraic Kenney, “1989: Democratic Revolutions at the Cold War’s End” (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are certain dates that every European historian knows. Among them are 1348 (The Black Death), 1517 (The Reformation), 1648 (The Peace of Westphalia), 1789 (The French Revolution), 1848 (The R...

Russell J. A. Kilbourn, "The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino: Commitment to Style" (Wallflower Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Russell J. A. Kilbourn’s The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino: Commitment to Style (Wallflower Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive study published in the English-speaking world on one of the most com...

George 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...

James E. Strick, “Wilhelm Reich, Biologist” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!” The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments i...

Stevan Allen, “Roaming Ghostland: The Final Days of East Germany” (Xlibris, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We like to think of countries as permanent fixtures. They aren’t. They come and go. In 1989, a place called the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany, was going. It was never really an “...

Mari K. Webel, "The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Politics of Disease Control. Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Mari K. Webel tells a history of colonial interventions among three communities of ...

Dagmar Herzog, "Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe" (U Wisconsin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), Dagmar Herzog examines the relationship between reproductive...

Jonathyne Briggs, “Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Pop pop pop pop musik” -M Jonathyne Briggs‘ new book, Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980(Oxford University Press, 2015) makes music the historical focus ...

Peter Fritzsche, “Life and Death in the Third Reich” (Harvard UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Germans and Nazis. They were different things, right? I mean some Germans were members of the Party and believed all it said and some were not and believed none of what it said. True enough, but ac...

Nicholas 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...

Elizabeth A. Fraser, "Mediterranean Encounters: Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774–1839" (Penn State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth A. Fraser's Mediterranean Encounters: Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774–1839 (Penn State University Press, 2017) takes its readers on a journey through six illustrated t...

Tom Junes, “Student Politics in Communist Poland: Generations of Consent and Dissent” (Lexington, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the conventional narratives of Communist Poland, and Eastern Europe more generally, student activism tends to get short shrift. While the role of students in 1956 is unavoidable and widely ackno...

Brett Whalen, “Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages” (Harvard UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the Gospels, the disciples come to Jesus and ask him about the End of Days. He’s got bad news and good. First, everything was going to go hell, so to say: “And Jesus answered . . . many shall co...

Ann Tucker, "Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy" (UVA Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new so...

Andrew Lambert, "Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Lambert, Professor of Naval History at King’s College, London, author of eighteen books, and winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal—turns his attention in a book that historian Felipe Fern...

Kimberly Arkin, “Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judai...

Alexander Watson, “Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918” (Cambridge UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s a question I’ve long asked myself: Why and how did common soldiers fight for so long in the First World War? The conditions were awful, death was all around, and there was no real hope of a “b...

James Renshaw, "In Search of the Romans" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Renshaw modestly describes his interactive textbook, In Search of the Romans (Bloomsbury, 2019) as an attempt to bring his high school readers to a “base camp on Mount Everest and then hand t...

Volker Berghahn, "Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can the lives of journalists under Hitler and Adenauer reveal? How did they navigate the Third Reich as "internal emigrants"? How did the emerging Cold War shape new tensions with their govern...

Richard C. Keller, “Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In August 2003, a heat wave in France killed close to 15,000 people, the majority of whom were over 75. Prominent among the dead were a group of victims known as “the forgotten,” people who died al...

Giles MacDonogh, “After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation” (Basic Books, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Germany, more specifically in a tiny town on the Rhine near Koblenz. The family I stayed with looked for all the world like typical Rhinela...

Ari Linden, "Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity" (Northwestern UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity (Northwestern University Press, 2020), Ari Linden analyzes Karl Kraus’s oeuvre while engaging in the conversation about modernism and modernity, which i...

Julian Jackson, "De Gaulle" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de ...

Shelly Cline, “Women at Work: The SS Aufseherin and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust” (Ph. D. Diss, U of Kansas, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps? Today’s interview marks the conclusion of my summer-long series of podcasts on the concentration ca...

Norman Stone, “World War One: A Short History” (Basic Books, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I was in high school, I really didn’t go in for reading. Until, that is, I somehow encountered Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I remember hiding in the back of all my cl...

Roger Moorhouse, "Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historian and academic Roger Moorhouse, revisits the opening campaign of World War II, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939., in his new book Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (B...

John Witte, Jr., "The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Witte, Jr.'s The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is an extensively researched book showcasing the author's deep knowledge and experience in the field...

Dana Simmons, “Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and...

Adrian Goldsworthy, “How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower” (Yale UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s the classic historical question: Why did the Roman Empire fall? There are doubtless lots of reasons. One historian has noted 210 of them. No wonder Gibbon said that we should stop “inquiring w...

Tamar Herzog, "A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To many observers, European law seems like the endpoint of a mostly random walk through history. Certainly the trajectory of legal systems in the West over the past 2,500 years is far from self-evi...

Kathryn Lomas, "The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By the third century BC, the once-modest settlement of Rome had conquered most of Italy and was poised to build an empire throughout the Mediterranean basin. What transformed a humble city into the...

John McMillian, “Beatles vs. Stones” (Simon and Schuster, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John McMillian‘s Beatles vs. Stones (Simon and Schuster, 2013) presents a compelling composite biography of the two seminal bands of the 1960s, examining both the myth-making and reality behind the...

Joel Lewis, “Youth Against Fascism: Young Communists in Britain and the United States, 1919-1939” (VDM, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most people know what “appeasement” is. You know, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi Anschluss with Austria, the Sudeten Crisis, Neville Chamberlain, “Peace in Our Time.” The Western democracies went ...

Amanda L. Scott, "The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amanda L. Scott’s book, The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800 (Cornell University Press, 2020), focuses on the Basque seroras, a category of uncloister...

Sarah Thomsen Vierra, "Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961-1990" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After years of being overlooked, there has been a growing interest among academic historians in the history of Turkish Guest Workers in West Germany. In her new book, Turkish Germans in the Federal...

Terrance J. Finnegan, “A Delicate Affair on the Western Front: America Learns How to Fight a Modern War in the Woevre Trenches” (The History Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his second book, author Terrance J. Finnegan describes America’s early experience fighting the Germans during World War I. Finnegan’s A Delicate Affair on the Western Front: America Learns How t...

Robert Hendershot, “Family Spats: Perception, Illusion and Sentimentality in the Anglo-American Special Relationship” (VDM, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gordon Brown, the British PM, came calling to Washington recently. He jumped the pond, of course, to have a chat with his new counterpart, President Barack Obama. They had a lot to talk about, what...

Giulia Bonazza, "Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States 1750–1850" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States 1750–1850 (Palgrave MacMillian, 2019) offers a pioneering study of slavery in the Italian states. Documenting previously unstudied case...

Angelos Chaniotis, "Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian(Harvard University Press, 2018), An...

David Snowdon, “Writing the Prizefight: Pierce Egan’s Boxiana World” (Peter Lang, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When ESPN anchor Stuart Scott passed away from cancer this past January, he was widely hailed for his innovative style, which mixed heavy does of African American slang and pop culture references. ...

Kees Boterbloem, “The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys: A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter” (Palgrave-McMillan, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we speak of the “Age of Discovery,” we usually mean the later fifteenth and sixteenth century. You know, Columbus, Magellan and all that. But the “Age of Discovery” continued well into the sev...

Erik Grimmer-Solem, "Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919"(Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Cambridge University Press) Erik Grimmer-Solem examines the process of German globalization that be...

Michael Cotey Morgan, "The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Just when you thought that you knew everything and anything pertaining to the Cold War and the ending of it, along comes University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Michael Cotey Morgan t...

Jeffrey S. Shoulson, “Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judai...

Mark Mazower, “Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe” (Penguin, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s curious how historical images become stereotyped over time. One hears the word “Nazi,” and immediately the Holocaust springs to mind. This reflexive association is probably a good thing, as it...

Jeremy Black, "War in Europe: 1450 to the Present" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

War in Europe: 1450 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) is a masterful overview of war and military development in Europe since 1450, bringing together the work of a renowned historian of mo...

Hassan Malik, "Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lumbering late Tsarist Russia and international finance? Is there anything there?  The Bolsheviks and finance? How can there be anything there?   It turns out that the answer to both questions is y...

Tabetha Ewing, “Rumor, Diplomacy, and War in Enlightenment Paris” (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tabetha Ewing‘s Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) is all about the on dit, the word on the street that everyday Parisians might ...

John Lukacs, “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning” (Basic Books, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much has been written about Winston Churchill recently. Some love him, some hate him. But few understand him, at least as well as John Lukacs. That’s hardly a surprise as Lukacs has been thinking a...

Francine Hirsch, "Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did an authoritarian regime help lay the cornerstones of human rights and international law? Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal? (Oxford Univers...

Anne Reinhardt, "Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937" (Harvard U Asia Center, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At a time when trade between China and the outside world is rarely out of the news, it remains important to remember that in centuries past global commerce moved in directions very different from t...

Kelly J. Whitmer, “The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Luthera...

Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus o...

Robert Gerwarth, "November 1918: The German Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Was Weimar doomed from the outset? In November 1918: The German Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2020), Robert Gerwarth argues that this is the wrong question to ask. Forget 1929 and 1933, the ...

Irmak Karademir Hazir, "Enter Culture, Exit Arts? The Transformation of Cultural Hierarchies in European Newspaper Culture Sections, 1960–2010" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How has European culture changed since the 1960s? In Enter Culture, Exit Arts? The Transformation of Cultural Hierarchies in European Newspaper Culture Sections, 1960–2010 (Routledge, 2018), Dr. Ir...

Dan Stone, “The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath” (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every year I ask my students to tell me when the Holocaust ended. Most of them are surprised to hear me say that it has not yet. Today’s podcast is the fourth of a summer long series of podcasts a...

Jeremy Black, "History of Europe: From Prehistory to the 21st Century" (Arcturus, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In History of Europe: From Prehistory to the 21st Century,?Jeremy Black?presents a learned and yet entertaining exploration of the history: political, cultural and social of Europe from its prehist...

Matthew Gabriele, "Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2018) is a rich, comparative study, drawing on the scholarship of eleven authors who discuss topics in medieval cultural, in...

Christine Desan, “Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christine Desan, teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory at Harvard Law School. In this podcast...

Christian Kleinbub, "Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies" (Penn State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies (Penn State University Press), Christian Kleinbub challenges the notion that Michelangelo, renowned for his magnificent portrayals of the human body, was merely co...

Harry O. Maier, "New Testament Christianity in the Roman World" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I had the opportunity to catch up with Harry O. Maier, professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Vancouver School of Theology, to discuss his new book, New Testament Christianity in ...

Joyce E. Salisbury, “Rome’s Christian Empress: Galla Placidia Rules at the Twilight of the Empire” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Before I read this excellent book, I had no idea that Rome–that is, the Roman Empire–ever had an empress. But, as Joyce E. Salisbury tells us in Rome’s Christian Empress: Galla Placidia Rules at th...

Hope M. Harrison, "After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Hope M. Harrison examines the history and meaning of the Be...

Noah Benezra Strote, "Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany" (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It has long been assumed that stability was imposed on Germany after World War II; that the United States in particular taught Germans, among other things, how to be “good democrats” and to value c...

James Turner, “Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities” (Princeton University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Notre Dame University. His book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014) recovers...

Allison Bigelow, "Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World" (UNC Press 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians of Latin America have long appreciated the central role of mining and metallurgy in the region. The Spanish Empire in particular was created for and founded upon the mining and coining o...

Paola Bertucci, "Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlighte...

Nikolaus Wachsmann, “KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps” (FSG, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Mu...

David Carballo, "Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mexico of five centuries ago was witness to one of the most momentous encounters between human societies, when a group of Spaniards led by Hernando Cortés joined forces with tens of thousands of Me...

McKenzie 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...

Lisa Moses Leff, “The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lisa Moses Leff joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss her new book, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015). In t...

Richard Carswell, "The Fall of France in the Second World War: History and Memory" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This fascinating book by Richard Carswell looks at how the fall of France in the Second World War has been recorded by historians and remembered within French society. The Fall of France in the Sec...

Daniel Siemens, “Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts (Yale University Press, 2017, Daniel Siemens, professor of European history at Newcastle University, writes a comprehensive his...

Sarah Helm, “Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women” (Nan A. Talese, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust M...

Alec Ryrie, "Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (Harvard University Press, 2019), Alec Ryrie, the award-winning author of Protestants offers a new vision of the birth of the secular age, looking to t...

Eric D. Weitz, “Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can the Weimar Republic teach us about how democracies fail? How could the same vibrancy that gave us cultural touchstones spawn Nazism? In his new book Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Pr...

Daisy Hay, “Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As I imagine most any biographer will tell you, one of the great joys and privileges of biographical research is using archives. This is where one encounters tangible pieces of the subject’s life- ...

Anya P. Foxen, "Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga (Oxford University Press, 2020), Anya Foxen traces several disparate yet entangled roots of modern y...

Lee Bidgood, “Czech Bluegrass: Notes from the Heart of Europe” (U Illinois Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Although bluegrass music is typically associated with the bluegrass state of Kentucky and Appalachia, the genre is actually played in many pockets all around the world.  In Czech Bluegrass: Notes f...

Raf De Bont, “Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While museums, labs, and botanical gardens have been widely studied by historians of science, field stations have received comparatively little attention.Raf De Bont‘s new book rectifies this overs...

Elizabeth Horodowich, "The Venetian Discovery of America" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode Jana Byars speaks with Elizabeth Horodowich, Professor of History at New Mexico State University, about her new book, The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination and P...

Michael Brenner, “A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society” (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society (Indiana University Press, 2018), edited by Michael Brenner, Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of ...

Geoff Megargee, ed., “The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos,” Vols. 1 and 2 (Indiana UP, 2009 and 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every semester when I get to the point in World Civ when we’re talking about Nazi Germany, I ask my students to guess how many camps and ghettos there were. I get guesses anywhere from a few, to a ...

John K. Roth, "Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide" (Cascade Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At Newman I co-teach a class titled "The Holocaust and its Legacies." I teach the course with a Professor of Theology and it's designed to help students understand the ways in which the Holocaust s...

Edward J. Watts, “Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny” (Basic Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite enduring for nearly five centuries, the Roman Republic ended in a series of crises and wars that discredited the idea of republics in the West for centuries. In Mortal Republic: How Rome Fe...

Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis, “The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling acro...

Jóhanna 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...

M. L. Rozenblit and J. Karp, “World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America” (Berghahn, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How was Jewish life affected by the First World War? How did Jews around the world understand, engage with, and influence the Great War and surrounding events? And why has the impact of World War I...

Eric Reed, “Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, ...

Why 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 ...

Iain Provan, “The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture” (Baylor UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Exactly five centuries after Martin Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, Christians continue to debate the best approach to the reading of their sacred book. ...

Meredith K. Ray, “Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Exploring the work of Fonte and that of many other incredi...

Pablo Meninato, "Unexpected Affinities: The History of Type in Architectural Project from Laugier to Duchamp" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While the concept of "type" has been present in architectural discourse since its formal introduction at the end of the eighteenth century, its role in the development of architectural projects has...

Naomi Seidman, “The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell In Love With Love, And With Literature” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell In Love With Love, And With Literature (Stanford University Press, 2016), Naomi Seidman, Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts at the University of Toront...

Kocku von Stuckrad, “The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000” (De Gruyter, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Science and religion are often paired as diametric opposites. However, the boundaries of these two fields were not always as clear as they seem to be today. In The Scientification of Religion: An H...

Brian 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...

Shannon Fogg, “Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While the history of the Second World War and Jewish persecution in France has been widely studied, the return of survivors in the aftermath of deportation and genocide has not received sufficient ...

Anton Weiss-Wendt, “The Nazi Genocide of the Roma” (Berghahn, 2015) and “Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe” (U of Nebraska Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Normally I don’t try and talk about two books in the same interview. But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sense to pair The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (Berghah...

Roxann Prazniak, "Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art" (U Hawaii Press 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The “Mongol turn” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries forged new political, commercial, and religious circumstances in Eurasia. This legacy can be found in the “sudden appearances” of common...

Patricia Lorcin and Todd Shepard, “French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories” (U Nebraska Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Following a 2011 meeting of the annual Mediterranean Workshop at the University of Minnesota, Patricia Lorcin (a co-convener) approached Todd Shepard (one of the workshop participants that year) ab...

James A. Secord, “Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library, Visions of Science: Books...

Michael 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...

Dirk H. Ehnts, “Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we spoke with with Dirk H. Ehnts to talk about his new book Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics (Routledge, 2017). This is a very accessible text for those interested in discov...

J. Laurence Hare, “Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums, and the German-Danish Borderlands” (U of Toronto Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A recent book review I read began with the line “borderlands are back.” It’s certainly true that more and more historians have used borderland regions as the stage for some excellent work on the co...

Éva Guillorel, "Rhythms of Revolt: European Traditions and Memories of Social Conflict in Oral Culture" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The culture of insurgents in early modern Europe was primarily an oral one; memories of social conflicts in the communities affected were passed on through oral forms such as songs and legends. Thi...

Michael G. Hanchard, “The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracies” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael G. Hanchard’s new book The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracies (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a rich and complex examination of the question of discriminat...

Gary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritu...

Kevin Duong, "The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kevin Duong, a political theorist in the Politics Department at the University of Virginia, has written a fascinating analysis of the way that violence has been used, in a sense, to create or promo...

Ivan Simic, “Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Ivan Simic explores how Yugoslav communists learned, adapted, and applied Soviet gender policies in...

Chris O’Leary, “Rebel Rebel” (Zero Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who is David Bowie? Fans and critics have debated this question throughout his lengthy and storied career. Chris O’Leary, in his new book Rebel Rebel (Zero Books, 2015) meticulously examines Bowie’...

Derek Penslar, "Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The life of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an arti...

Venus Bivar, “Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. T...

Felicia McCarren, “French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Felicia McCarren‘s latest book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the fascinating evolution of this urban dance form in the French context. ...

Victor Uribe-Urán, "Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic" (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Stanford University Press 2016), Victor Uribe-Urán compares the cases of Spain, and the late-colo...

Dániel Margócsy, et al., “The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions” (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful new book that will long be on the shelves of a...

Meryle Secrest, “Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography” (Knopf, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As Meryle Secrest notes in the introduction to her new book, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Knopf, 2014),”The most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth century is now just a name on a p...

Matthew Miller, "The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge" (Northwestern UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge (Northwestern University Press, 2018), Matthew Miller explores the literary evolution of the modern e...

Sara J. Brenneis, “Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015” (U Toronto, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To be quite honest, I had no idea there were any Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen. That’s perhaps an unusual way to begin a blog post.  But it reflects a real gap in the literature about the Holoca...

Emily Kuriloff, “Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so e...

Lucia Rubinelli, "Constituent Power: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

"The intellectual historian has to start with the words." – Richard Whatmore, What is Intellectual History? When political theorists write about the principle of popular power, that is, who are the...

Larry E. Jones, “Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The failure of democracy during the Weimar Republic is currently at the center of public discussion due to the global populist wave of the last few years. In his new book, Hitler versus Hindenburg:...

Joseph Webster, “The Anthropology of Protestantism: Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Anthropology of Protestantism:Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), anthropologist Joseph Webster takes readers deep into the lives of fishermen in Gamrie, a ...

Jeremy Black, "A Brief History of Portugal" (Robinson, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter University, has written a vivacious and insightful survey of Portuguese history, designed for travellers to the country. A Brief History of Portugal (Ro...

David Stuttard, “Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Among the many personages associated with the Peloponnesian War, none are as colorful as the Athenian general Alcibiades. In Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens (Harvard University Press, 20...

Benjamin Schmidt, “Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad ...

Leslie 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...

B. 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...

Robin Grier and Jerry F. Hough, “The Long Process of Development” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to a popular saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.” As concernswhat economists and political scientists call “development”–that is, progress towards libertyand prosperity–the saying see...

Ünver Rüstem, "Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Istanbul, there is a mosque on every hill. Cruising along the Bosphorus, either for pleasure, or like the majority of Istanbul’s denizens, for transit, you cannot help but notice that the city’s...

Lorenzo Zamponi, “Social Movements, Memory and Media: Narrative in Action in the Italian and Spanish Student Movements” (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do social movements remember the past? How do collective memories affect their current strategic choices? In his book Social Movements, Memory and Media: Narrative in Action in the Italian and ...

David Meren, “With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms in the Canada-Quebec-France Triangle, 1944-1970” (University of British Columbia Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1967, French President Charles de Gaulle cried out “Vive le Quebec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal’s City Hall. The controversial moment became a myth almost instantly. The four words De Ga...

Great Books: Melissa Schwartzberg on Rousseau's "The Social Contract" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The opening sentence of 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Roussau's The Social Contract poses a central question for all of us. Why do we liv...

Giulio Ongaro, “Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Giulio Ongaro, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Economics Department at the University of Milan-Bicocca has just published Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military S...

Michael Leggiere, “Blucher: Scourge of Napoleon” (U Oklahoma Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I have really enjoyed Michael Leggiere‘s earlier work, including the excellent Napoleon and Berlin : The Franco-Prussian War in North Germany, 1813 (2002), like this work, part of the Campaigns and...

Abraham Newman and Henry Farrell, "Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We live in an interconnected world. People, goods, and services leap across borders like never before. Terrorist organizations, like al-Qaida, and digital platforms, like Facebook, have gone global...

Sir 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 ...

Thomas Kemple, “Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Kemple‘s new book is an extraordinarily thoughtful invitation to approach Max Weber (1864-1920) as a performer, and to experience Weber’s work by attending to his spoken and written voice. I...

Ronen Steinberg, "The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the "Reign of Terror" end? In his new book, The Afterlives of Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2019), Ronen Steinberg expl...

Magda Teter, "Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The myth of Jews killing Christian children emerged in 1144 CE, with the death of a boy named William in Norwich, England. Over the course of several centuries, this myth gained traction and became...

Quinn Slobodian, “Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The relationship between neoliberals and the state is one that has been endlessly debated. Are neoliberals anti-statist? Or are they advocates of a strong state? The seeming vagueness of neoliberal...

Michael Gorra, “The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany” (Princeton UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite being Germany’s most famous literary lion, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to jump on a mail coach incognito to begin his travels to Italy (of course, he asked permission first from ...

Marta V. Vicente, "Debating Sex and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Spain" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s interview on New Books in History is with Dr. Marta Vicente, Professor of History at the University of Kansas to talk about her 2017 Cambridge University Press release, Debating Sex and Gen...

Eric Dursteler, "In the Sultan’s Realm: Two Venetian Reports on the Early Modern Ottoman Empire" (CRRS, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the Sultan’s Realm: Two Venetian Reports on the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2018) is Professor Eric Dursteler’s translation of two final diplomat...

Joseph Ben Prestel, “Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph Ben Prestel talks with us about Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 (Oxford University Press, 2017), blending together history of emotions, urban history...

Hugo Frey, “Nationalism and the Cinema in France” (Berghahn Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hugo Frey‘s new book, Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995 (Berghahn Books, 2014) distinguishes between a national cinema (films made in France) an...

Miri Rubin, "Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we speak to Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London about her 2020 Cambridge University Press publication, Cities of Strangers: Making Li...

Karl Qualls, "Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-1951" (U Toronto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Karl Qualls' new book Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-1951 (University of Toronto Press, 2020) examines how the Soviet Union raised and educat...

Benjamin Carter Hett, “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic” (Henry Holt, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The downfall of the Weimar Republic in Germany has long fascinated historians, but this catastrophe gained increasing prominence as a touchstone for contemporary political commentators in recent ye...

Aristotle Tziampiris, “The Emergence of Israeli-Greek Cooperation” (Springer, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Aristotle Tziampiris is The Emergence of Israeli-Greek Cooperation (Springer, 2015). Tziampiris is Associate Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International and Eu...

John Hartigan Jr., "Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wild horses still roam the mountains of Galicia, Spain. But each year, in a ritual dating to the 1500s called rapa das bestas, villagers herd these “beasts” together and shave their manes and tails...

Great Books: Nicholas Johnson on Samuel Beckett from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Another heavenly day” is the opening line of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days (1961), where Winnie sits buried to her waist in sand, with her husband Willie stuck a few feet away from her … but la...

Peter Heather, “Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the 6th century CE, the Roman emperor Justinian embarked upon a series of wars that seemed to herald the restoration of the Roman empire in the western Mediterranean. In his book Rome Resurgent:...

Dhara Anjaria, “Curzon’s India: Networks of Colonial Governance, 1899-1905” (Oxford University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I won’t speak for you, but I find it utterly remarkable that the British were able to “rule” India. Britain, of course, is a small island off a small continent some significant distance from most o...

Mark Cornwall, "Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. This key event in 20th-century history continues to fascinate the public imagination, yet few historians ...

Gavriel Rosenfeld, "The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightma...

Megan 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...

Nick Wilding, “Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge” (U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nick Wilding‘s new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an ...

Ioanna Lordanou, "Venice's Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are here with Dr. Ioanna Iordanou, a Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Oxford Brookes University and an Honorary Researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at ...

Peter Fritzsche, "Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We've grown to understand in the past few weeks how worlds can change in just a few days. Peter Fritzsche's new book Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (Basic Books,...

Jonathan Smyth, “Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality” (Manchester UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his speech delivered to the National Convention on 18 Floréal (May 7, 1794), Maximilien Robespierre shocked his listeners as he attacked the proponents of atheism and dechristianization in the g...

Brian Vick, “The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon” (Harvard University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who knows anything about European history–and European diplomatic history in particular–who doesn’tknow a little something about the Congress of Vienna. That “l...

Jeremy Black, "Tank Warfare" (Indiana UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of the battlefield in the 20th century was dominated by a handful of developments. Foremost of these was the introduction and refinement of tanks. In Tank Warfare (Indiana UP, 2020), prom...

Alexander Mikaberidze, "The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the battles most closely associated with the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous warfare affect the w...

Simon Levis Sullam, “The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Simon Levis Sullam, associate professor of modern history at Ca’ Foscari University ...

Kaeten Mistry, “The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the annals of cold war history Italy is rarely seen as a crucial locale.  In his stimulating new book, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare (Cambridge ...

Kiran 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...

Samuel Gregg, "Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization" (Gateway, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

So what is Western Civilization, anyway? The term itself is under assault from progressives, as if the very notion is somehow passé and is not inclusive enough in a globalized world. But, the fact ...

Richard S. Hopkins, “Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris” (LSU Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beginning in the mid-1800s, Paris experienced an unprecedented growth in the development of parks, squares, and gardens. This greenspace was part of Napoleon III’s plan for a new, modern Paris and ...

Sophia Rose Arjana, “Muslims in the Western Imagination” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Muslims in the Western Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sophia Rose Arjana explores a variety of creative productions–including art, literature, film–in order to tell a story not abo...

Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages: A Discussion with Roland Betancourt from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), Roland Betancourt reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in mediev...

Sir 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 ...

Irina 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...

Udi Greenberg, “The Weimar Century: German Emigres and the Ideological Foundation of the Cold War” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American policymakers and scholars alike have looked to the rapid transformation of Germany, specifically West Germany, from a defeated Nazi state into a thriving democracy as one of the most succe...

Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, ...

Matt 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...

Richard Ivan Jobs, “Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ever go backpacking through Europe? In Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Richard Ivan Jobs traces the postwar cultural history of the mak...

Akwugo Emejulu, “Community Development as Micropolitics: Comparing Theories, Policies, and Politics in America and Britain” (Policy Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Akwugo Emejulu has written Community Development as Micropolitics: Comparing Theories, Policies, and Politics in America and Britain (Policy Press, 2015). Emejulu is a lecturer at the Moray House S...

Konstantina Zanou, "Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Konstantina Zanou is an Assistant Professor of Italian and Mediterranean Studies at Columbia University. Her captivating book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering th...

Maurice Finocchiaro, "On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair (Oxford University Press, 2019), Maurice Finocchiaro shows that there were (and are) really two Galileo “af...

Mirjam Zadoff, “Werner Scholem: A German Life” (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Werner Scholem: A German Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Mirjam Zadoff, Director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, presents a biography of ...

Nicolas Kenny, “The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation” (U of Toronto Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicolas Kenny‘s new book, The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (University of Toronto Press, 2014) explores the sensory histories and urban development of Montreal and Brussels...

Edward Wilson-Lee, "The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library" (Scribner, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Edward Wilson-Lee's book A Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library (Scribner, 2018) details the life of Hernando Colón as ...

Adrian J. Boas, "The Crusader World" (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Crusader World (Routledge, 2015), edited by Adrian J. Boas, is a multidisciplinary survey of the current state of research in the field of crusader studies, an area of study which has become in...

Steven and Ben Nadler, “Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority and contemporary thinking—sometimes risking exc...

Alon Confino, “A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide” (Yale UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alon Confino‘s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014) begins with a vivid and devastating scene in the small German town of Fürth on ...

Hans-Werner Sinn, "The Economics of Target Balances" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every day, TARGET - Europe's cross-border payments system - processes transactions worth €2.5 trillion. Under its decentralised model, TARGET generates balances between the national central banks. ...

Steven Seegel, "Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Steven Seegel’s Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an insightful contribution to the history of map m...

Konrad Jarausch, “Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), Konrad Jarausch, the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University ...

Ann C. Pizzorusso, “Tweeting Da Vinci” (Da Vinci Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ann C. Pizzorusso‘s new book is a wonderfully creative and gorgeously illustrated meeting of geology, art history, and Renaissance studies. Arguing that understanding Italy’s geological history can...

Nimisha Barton, "Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On today’s New Books in History, we sit down with Dr. Nimisha Barton to discuss her new book, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2...

Jessie Labov, "Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture beyond the Nation" (Central European UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While there are still occasional uses of it today, the term "Central Europe" carries little of the charge that it did in the 1980s and early 1990s, and as a political and intellectual project it ha...

William D. Godsey, “The Sinews of Habsburg Power: Lower Austria in a Fiscal-Military State, 1650-1820” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Austria established itself as one of the dominant powers of Europe, despite possessing much more limited fiscal resources when compared to its counterparts. In T...

Matthew Stanley, “Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electrom...

Anthony A. Barrett, "Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to legend, the Roman emperor Nero set fire to his majestic imperial capital on the night of July 19, AD 64 and fiddled while the city burned. It's a story that has been told for more than...

Nicholas R. Jones, "Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain" (Penn State UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas R. Jones’s book, Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, 2019), analyzes white appropriations of black Afri...

Alexander Bevilacqua, “The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2018), Alexander Bevilacqua uncovers a different side of the European Enlightenment, at least with...

Robert J. Donia, “Radovan Karadzic: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a graduate student at Ohio State in the early 1990s, I remember watching the collapse of Yugoslavia on the news almost every night and reading about it in the newspaper the next day.The first ge...

Carl R. Trueman, "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution" (Crossway, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“My aim is to explain how and why a certain notion of the self has come to dominate the culture of the West, why this self finds its most obvious manifestation in the transformation of sexual mores...

Áine O'Healy, "Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her recently published Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame (Indiana University Press, 2019), Áine O'Healy explores how filmmakers in Italy have probed the tensions accompa...

Frank L. Holt, “The Treasures of Alexander the Great: How One Man’s Wealth Shaped the World” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most studies of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander III focus on the military aspects of his life and reign. Yet Alexander’s campaigns would not have been possible had it not been for the enormous p...

Heather Augustyn, “Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation” (Scarecrow, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is Ska music? This is a deceptively complicated question. In this podcast Heather Augustyn, the author of Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation(Scarecrow Press, 2013) discusses ska’s journey from a l...

Diana Darke, "Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe" (Hurst, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Visitors around the world have travelled to Europe to see the tall spires and stained glass windows of the continent’s Gothic cathedrals: in Cologne, Chartres, Milan, Florence, York and Paris. The ...

Karima Moyer-Nocchi, "The Eternal Table: A Cultural History of Food in Rome" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Karima Moyer-Nocchi is a professor of modern languages at the University of Siena and a lecturer for the Master in Culinary Studies program at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata. Her first book, C...

Gary Bruce, “Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (Oxford University Press, 2017), Gary Bruce, professor of history at the University of Waterloo, provides the first English-langu...

Anne Knowles, Mastering Iron (U of Chicago Press, 2013) and Geographies of the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigra...

Dominique Kirchner Reill, "The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard UP, 2020) recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by te...

Jonathan 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...

Adis Maksic, “Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect: The Serb Democratic Party and the Bosnian War” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Within the space of only six months in 1990, the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) managed to win the majority of the Serb vote in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In his new book, Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and ...

Sean Forner, “German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945” (Cambridge University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Federal Republic of Germany is often held up today as one of the world’s great democracies, where the commitment to such ideals as transparency, careful deliberation, social and political equal...

Christopher 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...

Jennifer A. Miller, “Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s” (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the 1960s, West Germany eagerly courted workers from Turkey to manage a labor shortage during the country’s Economic Miracle. This program caused one of the most consequential migrations in ...

Susan Byrne, “Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote” (University of Toronto Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Please listen to the fascinating conversation I had with Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University, about her new work, Law an...

Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales, "Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense" (Abbreviated Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales about their book Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense (Abbreviated Press, 2020). The Códice Casanatense, or Code...

Paul Hanebrink, "A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Harvard University Press, 2018), Paul Hanebrink, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, traces the complex histor...

Pamela Potter, “Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts” (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (University of California Press, 2016), Pamela M. Potter, Professor of Germany at the U...

Carol E. Harrison, “Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith” (Cornell UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the political left and right first arose during the French Revolution, Catholics have been categorized as either conservatives or liberals, and most Catholics of the French nineteenth century...

Paul Jankowski, "All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War" (Harper, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his latest monograph, All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and The Origins of the Second World War (Harper, 2020), Professor Paul Jankowski (Brandeis University) provides a wide-angled accou...

The 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...

Ben Clift, “The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis by Ben Clift” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I was joined in Oxford by Ben Clift, Professor of Political Economy, Deputy Head of Department and Director of Research at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of ...

Jan Lemnitzer, “Power, Law and the End of Privateering” (Palgrave, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jan Lemnitzer‘s new book Power, Law and the End of Privateering (Palgrave, 2014) offers an exciting new take on the relationship between law and power, exposing the delicate balance between great p...

Kaius Tuori, "Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars and the Battle for the Future of Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars, and the Battle for the Future of Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), Kaius Tuori examines the inherent unity of European legal traditions that ...

Elizabeth 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...

Samuel England, “Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts” (Edinburgh UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his thrilling and sparkling new book, Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Samuel England, Assista...

Michael Kwass, “Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground” (Harvard University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Kwass‘s new book, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground is much more than an exciting biography of the notorious eighteenth-century smuggler whose name remains le...

Andrea Pet?, "The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrea Pet?'s book The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) analyses the actions, background, connections and the even...

John Hardman, "Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new a...

James Retallack, “Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860 to 1918” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can political modernization reinforce authoritarianism? What brought middle-class liberals and conservative monarchists to make common cause in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany? How di...

Stephen L. Harp, “Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France” (LSU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the decades after the Second World War, France became the foremost nudist site in Europe. Stephen L. Harp‘s new book, Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France (Louis...

Gaby 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 ...

Cole Roskam, "Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shanghai’s role in shaping modern China and indeed the very idea of what modernity is in China can hardly be overstated. Much of this long-lasting influence can be seen in how the city itself came ...

Frances Kneupper, “The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What sounds like the title of a Hollywood movie is actually a result of meticulous historical research. Frances Courtney Kneupper‘s new book The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in La...

Thomas Kuehne, “Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a teenager, I heard or read or saw (in films or on television) story after story about the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Despite the occasional ‘corrective’ offered by Hogan’s Heroes, the imp...

Frederick Crews, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" (Picador, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna conti...

Larry Wolff, "Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where the victorious Allied powers met to reenvision the map of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's influence on the remapping of ...

Ashoka Mody, “Eurotragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For decades the implementation of a single European currency was seen by its advocates as a vital step in the post-World War II movement toward greater European integration. As Ashoka Mody details ...

Robert Hewison, “Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain” (Verso, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did a golden age of cultural funding in UK turn to lead? This is the subject of a new cultural history by Robert Hewison. Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (Verso, 2014) ...

S. 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 ...

Jonathan 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...

Albert Gurganus, “Kurt Eisner: A Modern Life” (Camden House, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though Germany was convulsed by violent unrest in the weeks following the end of the First World War, one of the few places where a new republican government was established peacefully was Munich. ...

Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of...

Dale Kedwards, "The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland" (D. S. Brewer, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, s...

Steven Ross and Wolf Gruner, "New Perspectives on Krystallnacht" (Purdue UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It's possible to organize a 20th-century German history course around the date 9 November. In 1918, Phillipp Schedemann proclaimed the creation of a new German Republic. In 1989, 9 November saw the...

Rebecca Erbelding, “Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe” (Doubleday, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe (Doubleday, 2018), Rebecca Erbelding examines the War Refugee Board created by FDR in 1944 near the c...

Cathy L. Schneider, “Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of Internation...

Cristina A. Bejan, "Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1930s Bucharest, some of the country's most brilliant young intellectuals converged to form the Criterion Association. Bound by friendship and the dream of a new, modern Romania, their members i...

Aimee 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...

Christina Scharff, “Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work: The Classical Music Profession” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What sort of inequalities characterize classical music today? In Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work: The Classical Music Profession (Routledge, 2018), Christina Scharff, a senior lecturer in c...

John Lloyd and Cristina Marconi, “Reporting the EU: News, Media and the European Institutions” (I. B. Tauris, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How those within the Brussels Beltway in the EU institutions must pine for the simple days of the past. Not only was the European project in itself far less contested, but the nature of the journal...

Mark Gilbert, "European Integration: A Political History" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Awareness of the EU's undeniable past and present importance can - and has - led to complacency and hubris. There is nothing inevitable about European integration". So writes Mark Gilbert in Europ...

Alex Hidalgo, "Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico" (U Texas Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is far more to a map than meets the eye. Such is the case in historian Alex Hidalgo’s Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2019)...

Stephan Resch, “Stefan Zweig und der Europa-Gedanke” (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Stefan Zweig und der Europa-Gedanke (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017), Stephan Resch analyzes the Austrian author’s relationship with Europe and the concept of pacifism. To date Stephan Zweig is a ...

Michelle Moyd, “Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa” (Ohio UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd wri...

Ara H. Merjian, "Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Ara Marjian, Professor of Italian and affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History at New York University...

Kathy Peiss, "The Information Hunters" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While armies have seized enemy records and rare texts as booty throughout history, it was only during World War II that an unlikely band of librarians, archivists, and scholars traveled abroad to c...

Donni Wang, “Before the Market: The Political Economy of Olympianism” (Common Ground, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Did capitalism exist in ancient Greece, the cradle of democracy and western civilization? I was joined to discuss this and other issues with Donni Wang, the author of Before the Market: The Politic...

Todd H. Weir, “Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ne...

Sharon T. Strocchia, "Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, (Johns Hopk...

Olivier Roy, "Is Europe Christian?" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Olivier Roy, who is professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, is one of the most influential analysts of religion and secula...

Donatella della Porta, “Legacies and Memories in Movements: Justice and Democracy in Southern Europe” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do transitions to democracy affect the shape and participation of social movements in the present? In their new book, Legacies and Memories in Movements: Justice and Democracy in Southern Europ...

Matthew Carr, “Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent” (New Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From London to Rome, Paris to Stockholm, there is no other contemporary issue that can move the general public’s political needle quite so quickly as immigration. In the seas between Libya and Malt...

Marisa Anne Bass, "Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton UP, 2019) Marissa Anne Bass explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative ...

David Morton, "Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique" (Ohio UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who built Africa’s cities? Going beyond the colonial archive and the planner’s gaze, David Morton’s Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique (Ohio Universit...

Shira Klein, “Italy’s Jews From Emancipation to Fascism” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What was Italy’s role in the Holocaust? Why is it that Italy is known as the Axis power that was benevolent to Jews, despite a scholarly consensus that many Italians actively participated in anti-J...

Edward Ross Dickinson, “Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moder...

Nurfadzilah Yahaya, "Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020) by Prof. Nurfadzilah Yahaya is a wide-ranging, geographically ambitious book that tells the story of t...

Aliide Naylor, "The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front" (I.B. Tauris, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Baltics are about to be thrust onto the world stage. With a 'belligerent' Vladimir Putin to their east (and 'expansionist' NATO to their west), Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are increasingly th...

Gillian B. Fleming, “Juana I: Legitimacy and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Castile” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Labeled in history as “mad,” Juana of Castile was in fact a complex figure whose sometimes emotional nature was exploited by the men around her as a way of limiting her ability to exercise her powe...

John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret...

Phillipa 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...

Erik Jensen, “Barbarians in the Greek and Roman World” (Hackett Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today the word “barbarian” has a derogatory connotation for most people. Yet in the classical world it was one that was often used not as a pejorative but as a means of denoting people of different...

Randal Doane, “Stealing All Transmissions: A Secret History of the Clash” (PM Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who are the Clash? How did they become the “only band that matters”? In this podcast, Randal Doane, the author of Stealing All Transmissions: A Secret History of the Clash (PM Press, 2014), discuss...

Murad Idris, "War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Murad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term itself and the way that it has been considered ...

Nathan Marcus, “Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921-1931” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Harvard University Press, 2018), Nathan Marcus, analyzes the events that took place around the financial crisis in Austria ...

Mark Corner, “The European Union: An Introduction” (I. B. Tauris, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Some say it should be a loose collection of sovereign nation states; others say it should aspire to be a kind of super-nation state itself. Or is it, in truth, a messy but workable mixture of a num...

John Tweeddale, "John Calvin: For a New Reformation" (Crossway, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Calvin continues to be the focus of a huge amount of scholarly attention. An annual bibliography records the thousands of items that are published every year on this most seminal of early mode...

Katelyn Knox, “Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First-Century France” (Liverpool UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Katelyn Knox’s book, Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First–Century France (Liverpool University Press, 2016) examines francophone literature, art, dance, music, and fashion, considering ho...

Daniel Lee, “Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Lee‘s new book, Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2014) is highly compelling in its breadth, depth of research, and anal...

Sandra Ott, “Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Sandra Ott, Associate Professor of Basque St...

Thomas Kohut, “A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century” (Yale UP, 2012), from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Germans belonging to the generation born at the turn of the twentieth century endured staggering losses, many of which became difficult to mourn or even acknowledge: their parents in World War I, f...

Robin Pickering-Iazzi, "Dead Silent: Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias, 1878-2018" (U Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robin Pickering-Iazzi’s Dead Silent: Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias, 1878-2018 is the first history of its kind in English. An open access ebook, this study literally ...

Jo Farb Hernandez, “Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments” (Raw Vision, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments (Raw Vision, 2013) is an audacious tome. A comprehensive survey of 45 art environments on the Spanish mainland, ...

Rebecca Rogers, “A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only wer...

Shai M. Dromi, "Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How should we understand humanitarian NGOs? In Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Shai M. Dromi, a lecturer in sociolog...

Chad Alan Goldberg, “Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought” (U Chicago Press, 2017 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Chad Alan Goldberg looks at how social thinkers from Karl Marx, to Emile Durkheim, to Robert P...

Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman, “The Third Reich Sourcebook” (U California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Primary source readers represent an unusual historical genre. Unlike editions, their aim is not to enable the reader to hear, as clearly as possible, the voice of a single historical personage or i...

Alex J. Kay and David Stahel, "Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking s...

Thomas Weber, “Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi” (Basic Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few would dispute that Hitler’s ideas led to war and genocide. Less clear however, is how and when those ideas developed. In his latest book, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (Basic Books, 201...

Jonathan Swarts, “Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies” (University of Toronto Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The new book, Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies (University of Toronto Press, 2013) shows how political elites in Britain, New Zealand, Australia ...

Peter J. Boettke, "F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I spoke with professor Peter J. Boettke the author of a great new book on Friedrich August von Hayek. Dr. Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Director of the F. A. Ha...

Motti Inbari, “Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism, and Women’s Equality” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, in its numerous manifestations, continues to exert profound influence on the Jewish world, even as it undergoes pressure to change from both within and without. In Jewish Ra...

Michael Osborne, “The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the history of colonial medicine. Eschewing pan-Eur...

Christopher 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...

Erin Hochman, “Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss” (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss (Cornell University Press, 2016), Erin Hochman, Associate Professor of Modern German and European Hist...

John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Scie...

Paul 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 ...

Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender” (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender is a collection of essays that spans over 40 years and challenges many received notions about the history of Hasidism —its origins, the evolving nature...

John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of o...

K. 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...

Robert Darnton, “A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Five decades ago, a young scholar named Robert Darnton followed up on a footnote that took him to the archives of the “Typographical Society of Neuchatel”(S.T.N.) in Switzerland, not far from the F...

Daryn Lehoux, “What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daryn Lehoux‘s new book will forever change the way you think about garlic and magnets. What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a ...

Abraham Kuyper, "On Education" (Lexham Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abraham Kuyper was one of the most important theologians in the Dutch Reformed tradition – and a newspaper editor, university founder and Prime Minister to boot. Lexham Press are publishing his "Co...

Adriana M. Brodsky, “Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Community and National Identity, 1880-1960” (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do immigrant populations navigate between ancestral ties and connections to their new homes? How do their plural histories create layered identities, and how do those identities change over tim...

Helene Snee, “A Cosmopolitan Journey: Difference, Distinction and Identity Work in Gap Year Travel” (Ashgate, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Helene Snee, a researcher at the University of Manchester, has written an excellent new book that should be essential reading for anyone interested in the modern world. The book uses the example of...

Emily Colbert Cairns, "Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emily Colbert Cairns’ book, Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), traces the biblical figure of Esther, the secret Jewish Quee...

Yair Mintzker, “The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial and condemned to death for his “misdeeds,” and ...

David B. Dennis, “Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I occasionally teach Western Civilization and you may have taken it in college. We all know the drill: Greeks-Romans-Dark Ages-Middle Ages-Renaissance-Reformation-Scientific Revolution-Enlightenmen...

Astrid M. Eckert, "West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the Iron Curtain shape the Federal Republic of Germany? How did the internal border become a proving ground for rival ideologies? West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, an...

James Chappel, “Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against religious freedom and the secular state. By the 1960s, that position was reversed and Catholics began advocating for particularly Catholic forms ...

David N. Livingstone, “Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David N. Livingstone‘s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the same Scottish Calvinist heritage engaged with Darwin a...

Ariel Mae Lambe, "No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ariel Mae Lambe’s new book No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) is a history of transnational Cuban activists who mobili...

Kathryn Woolard, “Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathryn Woolard is Professor Emerita and Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She has authored seminal works on language ideology and the sociolinguistic s...

Joe Moran, “Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV” (Profile Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The social and cultural historian Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK is interested in the everyday moments between great events. In his boo...

Jennifer Cazenave, "An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah" (SUNY Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer Cazenave’s An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (SUNY Press, 2019) is a fascinating analysis of the 220 hours of outtakes edited out of the final ni...

Sterling Murray, “The Career of an Eighteenth-Century Kapellmeister: The Life and Music of Antonio Rosetti” (U Rochester Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though he never enjoyed the fame of his contemporaries Mozart and Haydn, Antonio Rosetti was a successful composer whose works received a wide audience. In his book, The Career of an Eighteenth-Cen...

Alice Conklin, “In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950” (Cornell UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Host Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as thi...

Magnus Nordenman, "The New Battle for the Atlantic: Emerging Naval Competition with Russia in the Far North" (Naval Institute Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The New Battle for the Atlantic: Emerging Naval Competition with Russia in the Far North (Naval Institute Press, 2019), Magnus Nordenman explores the emerging competition between the United Stat...

Daniel B. Schwartz, “The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image” (Princeton UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benedito/Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1623-1677) lived at the crossroads of Dutch, scholastic, and Jewish worlds. Excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at 23, his works would later be p...

Adam Phillips, “Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst” (Yale UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as...

Benjamin Dangl, "The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia" (AK Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Moments before his death at the hands of Spanish colonial officials on November 15, 1781, Aymaran leader Túpac Katari assured his apostles as well as his adversaries that he would “return as millio...

Julia Kerscher, “Autodidacticism, Artistry, Media Practice” (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Autodidacticism, Artistry, Media Practice (Autodidaktik, Artistik, Medienpraktik [Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016]), Julia Kerscher, postdoc at the University of Tubingen examines t...

Andrew Demshuk, “The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the close of the Second World War, the Allies expelled several million Germans from the eastern portion of the former Reich. Thanks to the work of many historians, we know quite a bit about Alli...

Jonathan Erickson, "Imagination in the Western Psyche: From Ancient Greece to Modern Neuroscience" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Imagination is one of the most important elements of being human, but is most often assumed we know what it is, while rarely being analyzed. Here with me today is Jonathan Erickson to discuss his r...

Nathan Stoltzfus, “Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the Nazi regime respond to protest? How did Hitler’s desire for popular authority shape the relationship between state and society? Nathan Stoltzfus challenges the idea that the Third Reich...

Michael Bryant, “Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966” (University of Tennessee Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

My marginal comment, recorded at the end of the chapter on the Belzec trial in Michael Bryant‘s fine new book Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966 (University...

Eileen 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 ...

Mark Edward Ruff, “The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historical debates about the actions of the Roman Catholic Church in relationship to the Third Reich have never been restricted to academic presses and journals like so many other topics. Rather se...

Ari Joskowicz, “The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1873, the German scientist Rudolf Virchow declared in Parliament that liberals were locked in a Kulturkampf, a “culture war” with the forces of Catholicism, which he viewed as the chief hindranc...

Tobias Boes, "Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393