Podcasts by New Books in History

Mark Edele, "Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story" (Melbourne University, 2023) from 2023-08-13T08:00

"That Russia and Ukraine have diverged politically so radically since 1991 is partially due to their position vis-à-vis the imploded empire they emerged from," writes Mark Edele in Russia's War Aga...

Gregory Vargo, "Chartist Drama" (Manchester UP, 2021) from 2021-10-19T08:00

Greg Vargo's Chartist Drama (Manchester UP, 2021) opens a window into a fascinating aspect of working-class radical drama. This book includes scripts of four dramas performed or published by member...

Sai Balakrishnan, "Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the thoroughly researched, lucidly narrated new book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press), Sai Balakrishnan (Assistant Profe...

Anya Jabour, "Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing Women's Activism in Modern America" (U Illinois Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sophonisba Breckinridge's remarkable career stretched from the Civil War to the Cold War. She took part in virtually every reform campaign of the Progressive and New Deal eras and became a national...

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...

Douglas R. Egerton, "Heirs of an Honored Name: The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John and Abigail Adams founded a famous political family, but they would not witness its calamitous fall from grace. When John Quincy Adams died in 1848, so began the slow decline of the family’s p...

Elizabeth R. Baer, "The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich" (Wayne State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (Wayne State University Press, 2017), Elizabeth R. Baer, professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College exami...

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...

Miranda Kaufmann, “Black Tudors: The Untold Story” (Oneworld, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptized in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage ...

Waitman Beorn, “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most of the Jews and other victims the Nazis murdered in the Holocaust were from Eastern Europe, and the vast majority of the actual killing was done there. In his new book,  The Holocaust in Easte...

Kathryn Troy, “The Specter of the Indian: Race, Gender and Ghosts in American Seances, 1848-1890” (SUNY Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a meticulously researched study The Specter of the Indian: Race, Gender and Ghosts in American Seances, 1848-1890 (SUNY Press, 2017), Kathryn Troy investigates the many examples of Indian ghosts...

Jacob Emery, “Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism” (Northern Illinois U. Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), Jacob Emery presents literary texts as intersections of aesthetic, social, and economic ...

Julie Holcomb, “Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy” (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The question of how we should act when facing something gravely immoral is a difficult one. This is particularly true when that immorality touches upon our everyday life. Such was the issue that Qu...

Mark R. Stoll, “Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark R. Stoll is associate professor of history and Director of Environmental Studies at Texas Tech University. His book Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalis...

Leilah Danielson, “American Gandhi” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Leilah Danielson is an Associate Professor of History at Northern Arizona University and author of American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (University of ...

John Matthew Smith, “The Sons of Westwood: John Wooden, UCLA, and the Dynasty That Changed College Basketball” (University of Illinois Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the great dynasties of American sports are the UCLA men’s basketball teams of the 1960s-70s.  In a twelve-year span, the Bruins won ten national collegiate championships.  They had four unde...

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 ...

Elaine Tyler May, “America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation” (Basic Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Don’t you find it a bit curious that there are literally thousands of pills that we in the developed world take on a daily basis, but only one of them is called “the Pill?” Actually, you probably d...

M. T. Mulder and G. Marti, "The Glass Church: Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Glass Church: Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry (Rutgers UP, 2020), Mark Mulder and Gerardo Marti offer a compelling look at the rise and fall ...

Anita Kurimay, "Queer Budapest, 1873-1961" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the “Pearl of the Danube,” it boasted some of Europe’s most innovative architectural an...

Sam Roberts, "A History of New York in 27 Buildings: The 400-Year Untold Story of an American Metropolis" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book A History of New York in 27 Buildings: The 400-Year Untold Story of an American Metropolis (Bloomsbury, 2019), New York Times correspondent Sam Roberts tells the story of the city t...

Jeffrey James Byrne, "Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order" (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his brilliant, category-smashing book, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford University Press, 2016), Jeffrey James Byrne places Algeria at the center o...

Robert Mann, "Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon" (Potomac Book, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Throughout much of his career as an actor in Hollywood, Ronald Reagan identified as a passionate New Deal Democrat, yet by the time he turned to a career in politics in the 1960s he was a conservat...

Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author o...

Naomi Pullin, "Female Friends and the Making of Trans-Atlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Naomi Pullin, who is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick, UK, has just published an outstanding account of Female Friends and the Making of Trans-Atlant...

Lisandro Perez, “Sugar, Cigars and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York” (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A new book reveals an incredible slice of Cuban-American history that’s been all but forgotten until now. Lisandro Perez‘s Sugar, Cigars and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York (NYU Press, 201...

Victor Li, “Nixon in New York: How Wall Street Helped Richard Nixon Win the White House” (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1962 Richard Nixon suffered a humiliating defeat in the California gubernatorial election, one that led him to declare an end to his career in politics. What followed was one of the most remarka...

Alexander Knysh, “Sufism: A New History” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sufism, like many terms in the study of Islam, can be difficult to define and even more difficult to handle, but Alexander Knysh, in Sufism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2017), has pr...

Jon Kukla, “Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty” (Simon and Schuster, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To remember Patrick Henry for his defiant declaration “Give me liberty or give me death!” is to overlook a long career spent as an advocate for the rights of Americans, first as colonists and then ...

Jessica van Horssen, “A Town Called Asbestos” (UBC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2012, Canada stopped mining and exporting asbestos. Once considered a miracle mineral for its fireproof qualities, asbestos came to be better known as a carcinogenic, hazardous material banned i...

Eric Rauchway, “The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace” (Basic Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve been hearing a lot about economist John Maynard Keynes’ midcentury economic plans for the U.S. since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008. Are the measures that Keynes and FDR took t...

M. Brett Wilson, “Translating the Qur’an in an Age of Nationalism: Print Culture and Modern Islam in Turkey” Oxford University Press, 2014 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Muslim debates regarding the translation of the Qur’an are very old. However, during the modern period they became heated because local communities around the globe were rethinking their relationsh...

Patrick Weil, “The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Patrick Weil is the author of The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He is a visiting Professor of Law at Yale La...

James M. Banner, Jr., “Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is a historian? How are they trained? What do they do? What should they do? Are they doing it well? These important questions addressed in James M. Banner, Jr.‘s excellent Being a Historian: A...

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...

Joseph Clark, "News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When weekly newsreels launched in the early twentieth century, they offered the U.S. public the first weekly record of events that symbolized “indisputable evidence” of the news. In News Parade: Th...

A. de la Fuente and A. J. Gross, "Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020) tells the story of enslav...

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...

Han F. Vermeulen, "Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment" (U Nebraska Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Winner of the 2017 International Convention of Asia Schol...

Emrah ?ahin, "Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire" (McGill-Queens UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The past decade has seen a tremendous production of scholarship on American missionary endeavors in the Middle East. In Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Emp...

Michael R. Cohen, "Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era" (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael R. Cohen is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane University, where he holds a Sizeler Professorship. He is the author of the newly published Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish E...

Donald H. Akenson, “Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelicalism” (Oxford UP/McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Don Akenson, who is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen’s University, Ontario, is one of the most eminent scholars of Irish history. Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby...

Lon Kurashige, “Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States” (U North Carolina Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Lon Kurashige emphasizes the contingencies that shaped the histor...

Sridhar Pappu, “The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age” (HMH, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Sridhar Pappu, author of the book The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). Pappu is The Male ...

Gerben Zaagsma, “Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Gerben Zaagsma, Senior researcher at the centre for contemporary and digital history at the U...

Robert Lacey, “Pragmatic Conservatism: Edmund Burke and His American Heirs” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With Republicans in control of Washington, many suspect that conservatism is on the ascent. Others are wondering what conservatism even means in 2016. In which version of conservatism does Presiden...

Jessica Parr, “Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon” (UP of Mississippi, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

George Whitefield was a complex man driven by a simple idea, the new birth that brought salvation. Because of such passion, Whitefield received both enthusiastic support, preaching to audiences num...

Paula Kane, “Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America” (UNC Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America (UNC Press, 2013) is a detailed journey into the life of Margaret Reilly, an American Irish-Catholic from New York who entered the Convent of t...

Amy L. Wood, “Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940” (UNC Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Host Jonathan Judaken talks with author and professor Amy Wood about her book, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). W...

Alan Christy (trans.), Amino Yoshihiko, “Rethinking Japanese History” (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We don’t often make the chance to properly acknowledge the importance of translation to the understanding of history, let alone to talk about it at any length. Alan Christy has done a wonderful ser...

Amanda Podany, “Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I have a (much beloved) colleague who calls all history about things before AD 1900 “that old stuff.” Of course she means it as a gentle jab at those of us who study said “old stuff.” Gentle, but i...

Covell F. Meyskens, "Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1964, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military industrial complex...

Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, "The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On a cold March day in 1893, 26-year-old nurse Lillian Wald rushed through the poverty-stricken streets of New York’s Lower East Side to a squalid bedroom where a young mother lay dying—abandoned b...

E. Bruce Geelhoed, "Diplomacy Shot Down: The U-2 Crisis and Eisenhower's Aborted Mission to Moscow, 1959–1960" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of the Cold War is littered with what-ifs, and in?Diplomacy Shot Down: The U-2 Crisis and Eisenhower's Aborted Mission to Moscow, 1959–1960 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), Profess...

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)...

John Launer, "Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein" (Henry N. Abrams, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Launer's Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein (Henry N. Abrams, 2017) manages to supplant (and given the power of the visual image, this is no mean feat) the picture you...

Sam Erman, "Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sam Erman is the author of Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Almost Citizens recounts the story of how Puerto Rico ca...

Lukas Engelmann, "Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon? Who mobilizes these representations, and to what end? In Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic (Cambridge UP, 2...

Connie Chiang, “Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is a well-known topic in American history and has been the subject of countess books and articles. In Nature Behind Barbed Wire: A...

Lily Geismer, “Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberalism and the Transformation of the Democratic Party” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stories about the suburbs often focus on conservatism. But, as Lily Geismer shows in her fascinating book, called Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberalism and the Transformation of the Democratic Party ...

Peter Hempenstall, “Truth’s Fool: Derek Freeman and the War over Cultural Anthropology” (U Wisconsin Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The debate over Margaret Mead’s and Derek Freeman’s conflicting ethnographic reports has gone on for decades. While no longer a hot topic, Mead-Freeman stands as a testament to the power and, somet...

Zachary Lockman, “Field Notes: The Making of Middle Eastern Studies in the United States” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The dominant narrative in the history of the study of the Middle East has claimed that the Cold War was what pushed Middle East studies to develop, as part of a greater trend in area studies. Drawi...

Regis Darques, “Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans” (Springer, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Regis Darques‘ Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans (Springer, 2016) offers the unique mapping perspectives on the Balkan region. By exploring a range of topics such as borderlan...

Jeroen Duindam, “Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300-1800” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For most of recorded history, single rulers such a kings, queens, chiefs, and emperors exercised authority over human populations. Jeroen Duindam (Professor of Early Modern History, Leiden Universi...

Trygve Throntveit, “William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic” (Palgrave, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

William James (1842-1910) is one of the United States’ most far-reaching thinkers. His impact on philosophy, psychology, and religious studies is well documented, yet few scholars have considered J...

Xolela Mangcu, “Biko: A Life” (Tauris, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Host Jonathan Judaken speaks with Xolela Mangcu, biographer of Anti-Apartheid leader Steve Biko, about the life and murder of Steve Biko, as well as the struggle for equality in South Africa under ...

Cory MacLauchlin, “Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces” (Da Capo, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’ve spent any time in New Orleans, you can appreciate the challenge of putting the city’s joie de vivre into words.However, as a New Orleans native, John Kennedy Toole was steeped in the trad...

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...

College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom: A Conversation with Eddie R. Cole from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Some of America's most pressing civil rights issues--desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech--have been closely intertwined with highe...

Sherry L. Smith, "Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth-Century America" (Heyday Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The opening years of the twentieth century saw a grand cast of radicals and reformers fighting for a new America, seeking change not only in labor picket lines and at women’s suffrage rallies but a...

Michael Goldfield, "The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The golden key to understanding the last 75 years of American political development, the eminent labor relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in ...

Lana Dee Povitz, ?"Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice" ?(UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, government cutbacks, stagnating wages, AIDS, and gentrification pushed ever more people into poverty, and hunger reached levels unseen since the ...

S. Deborah Kang, "The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to S. Deborah Kang about her book The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954, published by Oxford University Press in 2017. The INS on the Line ex...

Christy Clark-Pujara, "Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island" (NYU Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island(NYU Press, 2016; paperback, 2018), Christy Clark-Pujara, Associate Professor of History in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the Unive...

Dilip Hiro, "Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent years, the concept of a ‘Cold War’ has been revived to describe the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two most influential states occupying positions of geopolitical importance i...

Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ...

Hans-Lukas Kieser, “Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a graduate student, I spent quite a bit of time explaining to people how we needed to pay much more attention to the history of World War One in the East.  What I didn’t realize is that we neede...

Kyle Longley, “LBJ’s 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America’s Year of Upheaval” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It was a year that at times left Lyndon Johnson feeling as though he was living in a continuous nightmare. Yet as Kyle Longley describes in his book LBJ’s 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency ...

Nick Dyrenfurth, “A Powerful Influence on Australian Affairs: A New History of the AWU” (Melbourne UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book, A Powerful Influence on Australian Affairs: A New History of the AWU (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Nick Dyrenfurth, Executive Director of the John Curtin Research Centre, ex...

Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance” (U. Michigan Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2015) Brian Eugenio Herrera examines the way in which Latina/o actors have communicated...

David Sartorius, “Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Sartorius‘s recent book Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba (Duke University Press, 2014), examines Cuban society in the nineteenth century, and the islanders...

Emily Anderson, “Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God” (Bloomsbury, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When one thinks of the connection of religion and imperialism in Japan, one automatically thinks first of Shintoism and second of Buddhism. Christianity does not usually figure into that story. How...

Kathleen Wellman, “Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Queens and royal mistresses of the Renaissance were the Hollywood celebrities of their time, which explains their enduring magnetism for writers, artists, and the public. Historians and scholars, h...

Gregory Crouch, “China’s Wings” (Bantam Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I was a kid I loved the movie “The Flying Tigers.” You know, the one with John Wayne about the intrepid American volunteers sent to China to fight the Japanese before the United States really ...

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...

Anjali Vats, "The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans  (Stanford University Press, 2020) by Anjali Vats is an intricate and meticulously researched text on intellectual...

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...

Greg Garrett, "A Long, Long Way: Hollywood’s Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his powerful new book, A Long, Long Way: Hollywood’s Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2020), Greg Garrett brings his signature brand of theologically mo...

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...

Noelle Giuffrida, "Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Noelle Giuffrida’s book, Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America (University of California Press, 2018), tells the history of collecting and exhibi...

Casey Lurtz, "From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2019), Casey Lurtz explains how the fertile yet isolated region of the Soconusco became integrated ...

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...

Zachary Lechner, “The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980” (U Georgia Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When talking about the American South in the second half of the twentieth century, popular discourse tended to fall into one of three camps (on occasion, two might coexist simultaneously): the “Vic...

Peter Sahlins, “1668: The Year of the Animal in France” (Zone Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign in France...

Erika Dyck and Alex Deighton, “Managing Madness” (U Manitoba Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Embracing a multi-perspectival authorial voice, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), tells the story ...

Did the Protestant Reformation Have to Happen? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the second podcast of Arguing History, historians Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie address the question of whether the Protestant Reformation, an event which transformed Christianity in the Western...

Gretchen Buggeln, “The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America” (U. Minnesota Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After World War II, America’s religious denominations spent billions on church architecture as they spread into the suburbs. Gretchen Buggeln’s latest monograph, The Suburban Church: Modernism and ...

Finn Brunton, “Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Finn Brunton‘s Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press, 2013) is a cultural history of those communications that seek to capture our attention for the purposes of exploiting it. From pran...

Paula T. Connolly, “Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790-2010” (U of Iowa Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The “peculiar institution” upon which the US nation was founded is still rich for examination.Perhaps this is why it is a subject to which 21st century authors continue to return. In this explorati...

Joshua Fogel, “Japanese Historiography and the Gold Seal of 57 C.E.: Relic, Text, Object, Fake” (Brill, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joshua A. Fogel‘s new book is a carefully researched and wonderfully thoughtful exploration of the transformations of an artifact as read through the transformations in the way that artifact has be...

Carolien Stolte, “Philip Angel’s Deex-Autaers: Vaisnava Mythology from Manuscript to Book Market in the Context of the Dutch East India Company, c. 1600-1672 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1658, a Dutch East India Company merchant by the name of Philip Angel presented a gift manuscript to Company Director Carel Hartsinck. It was intended to get into Hartsinck’s good books; Angel h...

Todd Moye, “Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the 1940s, the United States military performed an “experiment,” the substance of which was the formation of an all-black aviation unit known to history as the “Tuskegee Airmen.” In light of the...

Dinyar Patel, "Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present disco...

Mariana Mogilevich, "The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay's New York" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As suburbanization, racial conflict, and the consequences of urban renewal threatened New York City with “urban crisis,” the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay (1966–1973) experimented with a ...

Robert T. Chase, "We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Robert T. Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2020). In the early twenti...

Diana Lemberg, "Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the 1940s, America’s relations with the rest of the world have been guided by the idea of promoting the free flow of information. It’s an idea that seems benign, perhaps even difficult to arg...

Kenneth Fones-Wolf, "Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie" (U Illinois Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor Kenneth Fones-Wolf of West Virginia University discusses his book, co-authored with Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Ope...

Christina Thompson, "Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia" (Harper, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It's rare for a book of non-fiction to catch the interest of the reading public in the United States, much less a book on the history of science in the Pacific. But Christina Thompson's Sea People:...

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...

Anthony Slide, “Magnificent Obsession: The Outrageous History of Film Buffs, Collectors, Scholars, and Fanatics” (UP of Mississippi, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the major aspects of the popular film industry are the fans who want to collect material related to their favorite films, actors, and actresses. While this has become generally easier in the...

Guy Burton, “Rising Powers and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1947” (Lexington Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Rising Powers and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1947 (Lexington Books, 2018), Guy Burton, who teaches politics and international relations at the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government, stud...

Laura Engelstein, “Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921” (Oxford University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Laura Engelstein, Professor Emerita at Yale Univer...

Ira Dworkin, “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, i...

Jane Eppinga, “Henry Ossian Flipper: West Point’s First Black Graduate” (Wild Horse Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The remarkable story of Henry Ossian Flipper, a young man born into slavery on the eve of the Civil War, and his struggle for recognition left its mark on our nations history. Through extensive res...

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...

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, “Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture” (Oxford University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The intersection between Spanish-bilingual education and sex education might not be immediately apparent. Yet, as Natalia Mehlman Petrzela shows in her new book, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and ...

Keith Waters, “The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-1968” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“…when people were hearing us, they were hearing the avant-garde on the one hand, and they were hearing the history of jazz that led up to it on the other hand – because Miles was that history.” -H...

Marnie Anderson, “A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the late nineteenth century the Japanese elite embarked on an aggressive, ambitious program of modernization known in the West as the “Meiji Restoration.” In a remarkably short period of time, t...

John Steinberg, “All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most important political event of the twentieth century (no Revolution; no Nazis; no Nazis, no World War II; no World War II, no Cold War). It’s little wond...

Charles A. Kupchan, "Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the past few years isolationism, which had long been derided in the national discourse, has been making a comeback as a political force. In Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield...

Jonathan Lee, "Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present" (Reaktion Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Lee’s comprehensive study of Afghanistan’s political history in Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present (Reaktion Books) tells the story of the emergence and sometimes surprising l...

John Roosa, "Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On the night of September 30/October 1, 1965, a bungled coup d’état resulted in the deaths of a handful of Indonesian generals and a young girl. Within days the Indonesian army claimed that the Ind...

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, "A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Sarah Abrevaya Stein weaves a narrative tapestry whose threads are drawn from the archives of ...

Derrick E. White, "Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football" (UNC, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Derrick E. White's new book Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) chronicles the development o...

Ashley Robertson, "Mary McLeod Bethune in Florida: Bringing Social Justice to the Sunshine State" (The History Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mary McLeod Bethune was often called the "First Lady of Negro America," but she made significant contributions to the political climate of Florida as well. From the founding of the Daytona Literary...

Eliot Borenstein, "Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, conspiratorial thinking has taken deep root in contemporary Russia, moving from the margins to the forefront of cultural, historical, and political dis...

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...

Jacqueline Jones, “Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical” (Basic Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The award-winning author Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History at the University of Texas. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (Basic...

Mark Sedgwick, “Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his work, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mark Sedgwick maps the ideational processes that have led to the development of contemporary western S...

Peter Eisner, “MacArthur’s Spies: The Solider, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in WWII” (Viking, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The conquest of the Philippines in 1942 brought thousands of Americans under the control of the empire of Japan. While most of them were interned or imprisoned for the duration of the war, a remark...

Justin M. Jacobs, Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Justin M. Jacob‘s new book proposes that we understand modern China as a national empire, and traces the strategies of difference that have consistently marked Xinjiang as a part thereof. Xinjiang ...

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...

Christopher J. Phillips, “The New Math: A Political History” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher J. Phillips‘ new book is a political history of the “New Math,” a collection of curriculum reform projects in the 1950s & 1960s that were partially sponsored by the NSF and involved hun...

Susan Ware, “Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports” (UNC Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re younger than 45 or so, you probably don’t remember the “Battle of the Sexes.” This tennis match, between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, is one of the iconic moments in American history...

Miryam Sas, “Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Miryam Sas’ Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exceptionally rich study that has a great deal to ...

Michael Kranish, “Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The past is always with us, but it’s really always with politicians. Once you put yourself up for office, and particularly national office, everybody and his brother is going to start digging into ...

Anna Weltman, "Supermath: The Power of Numbers for Good and Evil" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mathematics as a subject is distinctive in its symbolic abstraction and its potential for logical and computational rigor. But mathematicians tend to impute other qualities to our subject that set ...

Thomas R. Metcalf, "Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920" (University of California Press, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas R. Metcalf’s Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920 (University of California Press) is an innovative remapping of empire. Imperial Connections offers a broad-rangi...

Natalie Kimball, "An Open Secret: The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Natalie Kimball is the author of An Open Secret: The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia, out this year from Rutgers University Press. An Open Secret argues that, despite s...

Sher Banu Khan, "Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641-1699" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her book, Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641-1699 (Cornell University Press, 2018), Sher Banu Khan provides a rare and empirically rich view of queenship in early m...

Iain MacGregor, "Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth" (Scribner, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is perhaps no more iconic symbol of the Cold War than the Berlin Wall, the 96-mile-long barrier erected around West Berlin in 1961 to stem the flow of refugees from Eastern Europe. In Checkpo...

William F. Trimble, "John S. McCain and the Triumph of Naval Air Power" (Naval Institute Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The carrier task force—the symbolic and physical manifestation of the United States’ ability to project naval and air power across the globe—came of age during the Second World War. Fighting the Im...

Elizabeth Schmidt, "Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror" (Ohio UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Of all the blank spots in the mental maps of many Americans, Africa is one of the largest. Informed by a number of misconceptions and popular myths, knowledge of the continent’s complexity is poorl...

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. ...

Brian James Leech, “The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit” (U Nevada Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The plight of today’s coal miners has gained significant attention in recent U.S. politics. As coal mining practices and technologies change in the United States, coal miners face job reductions, b...

Roger Frie, “Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if you suddenly discovered a cherished member of your family was a Nazi? How would you make sense of the code of silence that had kept an uncomfortable reality at bay? How would you resolve th...

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, “The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR’s Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The title of Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez‘s The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR’s Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford University Press/Hurst, 2017), tells you that this...

Ruth Rogaski, “Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China” (U. California Press, 2014 reprint) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since it was published in 2004, Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2014 reprint) has won four major prizes in fi...

Renata Keller, “Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When former Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas traveled to Havana in 1959 to celebrate the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Fidel Castro in front of a crowd of tho...

Emily Alice Katz, “Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967” (SUNY Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

World War Two and the establishment of the State of Israel significantly altered American Jewish attitudes toward Zionism. American Jews supported Israel during times of conflict, like the 1948 war...

Rick Baldoz, “The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898-1946” (NYU Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rick Baldoz is the author of The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (NYU Press, 2011), which investigates the complex relationship between the U.S. and Fili...

Anne M. Blackburn, “Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka,” (The University of Chicago Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this important contribution to both the study of South Asian Buddhism as well the burgeoning field of Buddhist modernity, Anne Blackburn‘s Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri...

Jerry Muller, “Capitalism and the Jews” (Princeton UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I confess I was attracted to this book by the title: Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, 2010). Capitalism is a touchy subject; Jews are a touchy subject. But capitalism and the Jews, that’s a disa...

Carl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962" (U Virginia Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By 1935 William Faulkner was well established as an author of critically praised novels, yet the low volume of his sales forced him to seek work in Hollywood. As Carl Rollyson details in The Life o...

Pernille Røge, "Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa c. 1750-1802" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802 (Cambridge UP, 2020), Dr. Pernille Røge charts the confluence and reciprocal impacts of i...

Julia Obertreis, "Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991" (V and R Unipress, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991 (V & R Unipress, 2017), Julia Obertreis explores the infrastructural, technical, and environmental aspects of the...

Ellen Griffith Spears, "Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor Ellen Griffith Spears of the University of Alabama, author of Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) discusses t...

Karen Routledge, "Do You See Ice?: Inuit and Americans at Home and Away" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the 1800s, explorers and whalers returning home from the Arctic described a cold, desolate world, one that could swallow up expeditions without leaving a trace. But this did not describe the Arc...

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...

Christian Philip Peterson, "The Routledge History of World Peace Since 1750" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christian Philip Peterson joins us today to talk about The Routledge History of World Peace since 1750 (Routledge, 2018), which he co-edited with William M. Knoblauch and Michael Loadenthal. The co...

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...

Ross King, “Seoul: Memory, Reinvention and the Korean Wave” (University of Hawaii Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Seoul, as any listener who has visited will recognize, can be a pretty overwhelming place. This is well recognized by Ross King, Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Pla...

Andy Bruno, “The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can be learned about the Soviet Union by viewing it through an environmental lens? What would an environmental history teach us about power in the Soviet system? What lessons can be drawn from...

Albert Wu, “From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860-1950” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Where Europeans have gone, so, too, have their ideas about religion. We know that this was no one-way street, that Christian missionaries have both changed and been changed by their interaction wit...

Jean-Germain Gros, “Healthcare Policy in Africa” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Healthcare Policy In Africa: Institutions and Politics from Colonialism to the Present (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Jean-Germain Gros argues that healthcare policy should be the black box rat...

Julie Des Jardins, “Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man” (Oxford University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In anticipation of Super Bowl 50, Sports Illustrated and WIRED magazines teamed up to speculate about the state of football fifty years from now, at the time of Super Bowl 100. Of course, the big q...

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...

Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” M...

Angela Pulley Hudson, “Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South” (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most historians have understood Native American history through the use of the “middle ground” metaphor. Notably, historian Richard White used this metaphor to explain the social relationships betw...

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 ...

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...

S. J. Potter, "Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the aftermath of the First World War, many people sought to use the new mass medium of radio as a tool for world peace, believing that it could promote understanding across national boundaries. ...

Derek R. Sainsbury, "Storming the Nation: The Unknown Contributions of Joseph Smith’s Political Missionaries" (BYU RSC, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Derek R. Sainsbury's, Storming the Nation: The Unknown Contributions of Joseph Smith’s Political Missionaries (BYU RSC, 2020), uncovers the significant but previously unknown contributions of the e...

SherAli Tareen, "Defending Muhammad in Modernity" (U Notre Dame Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), SherAli Tareen, an associate professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College, takes us into t...

AfroAm Studies Roundtable: Ashley Farmer on "Archiving While Black" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For histories to be written, historians must engage archival material. What happens, though, when particular groups of historians do not feel like they have full access to archival material(s), sim...

Courtney Pace, "Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall (University of Georgia Press, 2019) is the first full-length critical study of Rev. Dr. Prathia Laura Ann Hall (1940–2002), an undersung leader in...

Margaret Leslie Davis , "The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey" (TarcherPerigee, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Of the millions of books that have been published, few are as renowned or as coveted today by collectors as the famous Bible printed in the 15th century by Johannes Gutenberg. In The Lost Gutenberg...

Stefan M. Bradley, “Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League” (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that h...

Laura Kalba, “Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art” (Penn State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Pe...

Omer Bartov, “Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz” (Simon and Schuster, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making at the national or regional level, scholars are ...

Jennifer T. Roberts, “The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Peloponnesian War was one of the first subjects of historical inquiry, and one that has been the subject of many works ever since Thucydides wrote his famous account of the conflict. Yet these ...

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...

Samuel Moyn, “Christian Human Rights” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Samuel Moyn is Professor of Law and History at Harvard University. In Christian Human Rights University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Moyn provides a historical intervention in our understanding of...

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Riots, audiences on stage, fabulous costumes, gripping stories. That’s what theater was like in the Atlantic world in the age of slavery and colonialism. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon wonderful book New...

Samuel Moyn, “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History” (Harvard UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press 2010) takes the reader on a sweeping journey through the history of international law from the ancient world to the present in sea...

Kenneth Brashier, “Ancestral Memory in Early China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If New Books in East Asian Studies were an All-Powerful Force of Good In The Universe and if one of the perks that came along with being an All-Powerful Force of Good In The Universe were to ensure...

Joanna Levin, “Bohemia in America, 1858-1920” (Stanford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You’ve probably heard of hipsters. Heck, you may even be a hipster. If you don’t know what a hipster is, you might spend some time on this sometimes entertaining website. Where do hipsters come fro...

Jill Watts, "The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt" (Grove Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When did Black Americans move from stalwart party of Lincoln Republicans to dedicated New Deal Democrats? How did a group of self-organized Black economists, lawyers, sociologists, and journalists ...

Sean Roberts, "The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In today’s new episode, we speak with Sean Roberts about his brand new book The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press, 2020). Roberts i...

Catherine Belton, "Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West" (FSG, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Russian state is back. That may not be a big surprise to Russia watchers. The degree to which it is a KGB state, however, is documented in great detail in Catherine Belton's new book Putin's Pe...

Graham R. G. Hodges, "Black New Jersey 1664 to the Present Day" (Rutgers UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Black New Jersey 1664 to the Present Day (Rutgers University Press, 2018) by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, George Langdon, Jr. Professor of History and Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate U...

Paula McQuade, "Catechisms and Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century England" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paula McQuade, professor of English literature at DePaul University, is the author of a brilliant new account of Catechisms and Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University ...

Reinhart Kössler, "Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past" (U Namibia Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s Namibia was once the German colony of South West Africa, for a 30-year period spanning of 1884 to 1915. From 1904-1908, German colonial troops committed the first genocide of the 20th centu...

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...

Jenifer Parks, “The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sport Bureaucracy, and the Cold War: Red Sport, Red Tape” (Lexington Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Jenifer Parks, Associate Professor of History at Rocky Mountain College. Parks is the author of The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sport Bureaucracy, and the Cold War: Red Sport, ...

Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Researching and writing about infrastructure is a tall task. Infrastructure’s vastness, complexity, and, if it’s functioning, invisibility can defy narratives. Andrew Needham, however, succeeds bea...

Kevin Bartig, “Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kevin Bartig’s new book Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores multiple facets of one of the most famous film scores of the twentieth century, as well as the ...

Leigh Fought, “Women in the World of Frederick Douglass” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Leigh Fought is an assistant professor of history at Le Moyne College. Her book Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers a detailed and rich portrait of Frede...

Lena Salaymeh, “Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her brilliant new book Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Lena Salaymeh, Associate Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University, p...

Cindy R. Lobel, “Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

New York City’s growth, from colonial outpost to the center of the gastronomic world is artfully crafted by Cindy R. Lobel, Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Ce...

Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, Astrid Henry, “A Short, Surprising History of American Women’s Movements” (Liveright, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our guest today, Linda Gordon, is professor of history and humanities as New York University. Gordon and her co-authors Dorothy Sue Cobble and Astrid Henry have written Feminism Unfinished: A Short...

Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, “Theaters of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing, and Atrocity through History” (Berghan Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We spend a lot of time arguing about the meaning and implications of words in the field of genocide studies. Buckets of ink have been spilled defining and debating words like genocide, intent, ‘in ...

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...

Heather Cox Richardson, “Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre” (Basic Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Of all the events in American history, two are far and away the most troubling: slavery and the near-genocidal war against native Americans. In truth, we’ve dealt much better with the former than t...

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...

Mark Santiago, "A Bad Peace and A Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795-1799" (U Oklahoma Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In August 1795, Apaches wiped out two Spanish patrols In the desert borderlands of the what is today the American Southwest and Mexican north. This attack ended what had bene an uneasy peace betwee...

John Harney, "Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895-1968" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by John Harney, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Asian Studies Department at Centre College, and author of Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Ide...

Jürgen Melzer, "Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over the course of three decades Japan built an aircraft industry that by 1941 was qualitatively the equal of any in the world. In Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Avia...

Sara Lorenzini, "Global Development: A Cold War History" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As Dr. Sara Lorenzini points out in her new book Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton UP, 2019), the idea of economic development was a relatively novel one even as late as the 1940s. ...

Andrew Torget, "Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850" (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The secession of Texas from Mexico was a dry run for the slaveholder’s republic of the Confederate States of America, argues Andrew Torget in Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformatio...

Lincoln A. Mitchell, "Baseball Goes West: The Dodgers, the Giants, and the Shaping of the Major Leagues" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ask a Brooklynite over the age of fifty and they’ll likely tell you that baseball’s golden age ended the day the Dodgers and Giants packed up and headed for the West Coast. Not so argues Lincoln A....

Jonathan Shandell, “The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era” (U Iowa Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The role of the artist in the cause of Black freedom has been a hotly debated topic for generations now. Dr. Jonathan Shandell’s The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (University...

Helen Bones, “The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand Writers and the Colonial World” (Otago University Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand Writers and the Colonial World (Otago University Press, 2018), Helen Bones, a Research Associate in Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University...

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, “Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War” (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Typically the Jim Crow Era of segregation is understood as beginning directly after Reconstruction and going into the mid-twentieth century with the dual climaxes of the Brown vs. Board Supreme Cou...

Patty Farmer, “Playboy Laughs: The Comedy, Comedians, and Cartoons of Playboy” (Beaufort Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Playboy Laughs: The Comedy, Comedians, and Cartoons of Playboy (Beaufort Books, 2017), Patty Farmer examines the relationship between Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire and some of the m...

Anthony M. Petro, “After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emerging in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was not just a public health crisis. It was a moral crisis too, argues Anthony M. Petro in his new book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and Americ...

Erica Fox Brindley, “Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c.400 BCE-50 CE” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Erica Fox Brindley‘s new book is a powerful study of the history of conceptions of ethnicity in early China that focuses on the Hua-xia and the peoples associated with its southern frontier (Yue/Vi...

A. Mark Smith, “From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A. Mark Smith‘s new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) sugg...

Neil McKenna, “Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England” (Faber & Faber, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be. It’s a statement that seems obvious enough and yet one which is still, to some degree, casually combative. For biography has long bee...

Minkah Makalani, “In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939” (UNC Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Minkah Makalani is the author of a new intellectual history on the efforts of early twentieth century black radicals to organize an international movement, one that would address both racial and cl...

Audrey Kurth Cronin, “How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns” (Princeton UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s one thing to say that the study of history is “relevant” to contemporary problems; it’s another to demonstrate it. In How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Camp...

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 ...

Meg Heckman, "Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party" (Potomac Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite her nearly two decades as the publisher of the largest newspaper in a politically pivotal state, the role of Nackey Scripps Loeb in American political and media history has been unjustly fo...

Ashley E. Kerr, "Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910)" (Vanderbilt UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Analyzing a wide variety of late-nineteenth-century sources, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910) (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020) argues that Argentine ...

Emily E. LB. Twarog, "Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of women's political involvement has focused heavily on electoral politics, but throughout the twentieth century women engaged in grassroots activism when they found it increasingly cha...

Trevor Thompson, "Playing for Australia: The First Socceroos, Asia, and World Football" (Fair Play, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Trevor Thompson, a journalist who has reported on association football in Australia and around the world since the 1980s. He is also the author of Playing for Australia: The ...

Vicki Howard, "From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week we take a break from fun and games to talk about business and consumerism–which, to be sure, is for some people also fun and games. As Vicki Howard reminds us in her new book, From Main S...

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...

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 ...

Steven Lubar, “Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Steven Lubar’s latest book Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven gets to the heart of what makes museums so interesting to both appreciate a...

Emily C. Nacol, “An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emily C. Nacol has written a fascinating interrogation of the idea of risk, the concept of vulnerability, and the evolution of probabilistic thinking as conceived of and explored by four of the pre...

Patrick N. Hunt, “Hannibal” (Simon and Schuster, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 218 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca launched an invasion of Italy designed to bring the Roman Republic to its knees. Yet for all of his success in defeating Rome’s legions on the ba...

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic carte de visite portraits of herself ...

Jessica Martucci, “Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Martucci‘s fascinating new book traces the emergence, rise, and continued practice of breastfeeding in America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Back to the Breast: Natural Mothe...

Agnieszka Helman-Wazny, “The Archaeology of Tibetan Books” (Brill, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Archaeology of Tibetan Books (Brill, 2014), Agnieszka Helman-Wazny explores the varieties of artistic expression, materials, and tools that have shaped Tibetan books over the millennia. Digging ...

Angela N. H. Creager, “Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science a...

Avner Ben Zaken, “Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism (John...

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...

Jeremy Black, "Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance" (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

History and geography delineate the operation of power, not only its range but also the capacity to plan and the ability to implement. Approaching state strategy and policy from the spatial angle, ...

Hettie V. Williams, "Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History" (Praeger, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Black women intellectuals have traditionally been overlooked in the academic study of American intellectual history. Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (...

Gabriel Finder, "Justice behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland" (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Americans think about trials of Holocaust perpetrators, they generally think of the Nuremberg Trials or the trial of Adolf Eichmann or perhaps of the Frankfort trials of perpetrators from Ausc...

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...

John Shelton Reed, "Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s" (LSU Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Shelton Reed, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology (emeritus) at the University of North Carolina, has been observing the South for decades. This week he and Al Zambone talk about New...

Tyrell Haberkorn, "In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand" (U Wisconsin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the preface to In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) Tyrell Haberkorn asks, echoing Pakavadi Veerapaspong, if and when it might one day be p...

Shonaleeka Kaul, "The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural historian of early South Asia specializing in working with Sanskrit texts. She is Associate Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru Univer...

Robert Kagan, “The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World” (Knopf, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Dangerous Nation, Of Para...

William E. Ellis, “Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humorist” (UP of Kentucky, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today Irvin S. Cobb is remembered primarily as an author of humorous tales about life in Kentucky. Yet as William E. Ellis describes in his book Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humo...

Michael Patrick Cullinane, “Theodore Roosevelts Ghost: The History and Memory of an American Icon” (LSU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

That Theodore Roosevelt remains one of America’s most recognizable presidents nearly a century after his death is due in no small measure to the flamboyant image he presented. Yet as Michael Patric...

Max Krochmal, “Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era” (UNC, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) is about the “other” Texas, not the state known for its cowboy conser...

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 ...

Michelle Chase, “Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962” (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This episode features Michelle Chase, who joins us to discuss her fascinating new book, Revolution Within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962 (University of North Carolina ...

Tanya Storch, “The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Cambria, 2014), from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tanya Storch‘s recent book, The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Cambria, 2014), focuses on the development of Chinese Buddhist catalogs fro...

David Spafford, “A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

So many history books take for granted that a story about the past needs to focus on change (gradual or dramatic, transformative or subtle) as its motivating narrative and argumentative core. In A ...

Steven H. Jaffe, “New York at War: Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham” (Basic Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many people – including myself – are no doubt surprised to learn about New York City’s rich four hundred year military history. I teach in Flushing, New York, deep in the heart of Queens, at one of...

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...

Clayborne Carson, "Malcolm X: The FBI File" (Skyhorse, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is a Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. We delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting the fundamentally mistake...

B. Heersink and J. A. Jenkins, "Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Prior to the 1960s, Democrats were seen as having a lock on the South in national and local electoral politics, while Republicans had strengths in other parts of the country. While this was the cas...

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...

Orly Clergé, "The New Noir: Race, Identity and Diaspora in Black Suburbia" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How has the expansion of the Black American middle class and the increase in the number of Black immigrants among them since the Civil Rights period transformed the cultural landscape of New York C...

Najam Haider, "The Rebel and the Imam in Early Islam" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the absence of any real certainty about the nature and intention of the early sources that tell us the story of the early Islamic period, how can we use them? What sort of methodological approac...

Ricardo Cubas Ramacciotti, "The Politics of Religion and the Rise of Social Catholicism in Peru (1884-1935)" (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Politics of Religion and the Rise of Social Catholicism in Peru (1884-1935): Faith, Workers, and Race Before Liberation Theology (Brill, 2018), Ricardo Cubas Ramacciotti, Associate Professor...

Roger Robinson, "When Running Made History" (Syracuse UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“A race can mean more than a race,” Roger Robinson writes in his new book, When Running Made History. “It can show that human beings are still capable of attaining pure beauty through arduous endea...

Robert G. Ingram, “Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England” (Manchester UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert G. Ingram’s Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press, 2018) radically reinterprets the English Reformation. Subject...

Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War: A World History” (Basic Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There have been many histories and treatments of the Cold War, few however have the breath, range and definitiveness of Harvard Professor Odd Arne Westad’s new take on the subject: The Cold War: A ...

David Cannadine, “Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906” (Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sir David Cannadine, Professor of History at Princeton University, president of the British Academy, and the general editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, narrates the century of P...

Raul Coronado, “A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Harvard University Press 2013) Dr. Raul Coronado provides an intellectual history of the Spanish America’s decentered from the...

Jeremy Adelman, “Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman” (Princeton UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Although defined throughout his professional career as a development economist, Albert O. Hirschman’s intellectual scope defied classification. In Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirs...

Tam Ngo and Justine B. Quijada, eds., “Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia” (Palgrave, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Secularism has emerged as a central category of twenty-first century political thought and critical theory. Following the lead of anthropologist Talal Asad, there is a growing literature that trace...

Michelle Nickerson, “Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right” (Princeton UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Recently, historians have shown that the modern conservative movement is older and more complex than has often been assumed by either liberals or historians. Michelle Nickerson‘s book, Mothers of C...

Sandrine Sanos, “The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France” (Stanford University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013), examines the central roles that gender, sexual...

Roel Sterckx, “Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roel Sterckx‘s book Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2011) had me at drunken seances. (Drunken seances! Do you really need another excuse to read it?) It i...

Greg Castillo, “Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design” (Minnesota UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you grew up in the 1960s or 1970s in suburbia, you probably lived in a smallish ranch house that looked like this. That house probably had an “ultra modern” kitchen that probably looked like thi...

Jim Downs, "Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation" (Basic Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite the tremendous gains of the LGBT movement in recent years, the history of gay life in this country remains poorly understood. According to conventional wisdom, gay liberation started with t...

Glenda Goodman, "Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were all working in Europe during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, so perhaps it is no surprise that musicologists have diligently studied these men and thei...

Clifford Mason, "Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by Clifford Mason, celebrated actor, director, writer, and playwright, and autho...

Ariella Aisha Azoulay, "Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ariella Aisha Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of ...

Carlton F. W. Larson, "The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carlton F. W. Larson is the author of The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2019). The Trials of Allegiance looks at the law of treason du...

Anne Twitty, "Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787-1857" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anne Twitty is the author of Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787-1857, published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. Before Dred Scott looks at numerous...

Mickey and Dick Flacks, "Making History/Making Blintzes: How Two Red Diaper Babies Found Each Other and Discovered America" (Rutgers UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mickey and Dick Flacks' new book Making History/Making Blintzes: How Two Red Diaper Babies Found Each Other and Discovered America (Rutgers UP, 2018) is a chronicle of the political and personal li...

Chloe Thurston, “At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Earlier this year, we heard from Suzanne Mettler and her book on the politics of policies hidden from view. Mettler explained that most Americans are benefiting from numerous public policies, but o...

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...

Claire Eldridge, “From Empire to Exile” (Manchester UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The French-Algerian War that erupted in 1954 ended with the emergence of an independent Algeria in 1962, but it was not until decades later that a broader French public turned its attention with vi...

Geoffrey D. Claussen, “Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simhah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar” (SUNY Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Sim?ah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar (SUNY Press, 2015), Geoffrey D. Claussen provides a thorough study of the life and work of one of the most influential figures i...

Marc R. Blackburn, “Interpreting American Military History at Museums and Historical Sites,” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our guest for this interview combines his academic expertise in American military history with his professional experience as an employee of the National Park Service. Marc Blackburn is the author ...

Paul R. Josephson, “Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans: The Politics of Everyday Technologies” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul R. Josephson‘s new book explores everyday technologies – fish sticks, sports bras, sugar, bananas, aluminum cans, potatoes, fructose, and more – as technological systems that embody vast socia...

Katherine Lebow, “Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism and Polish Society, 1949-1956” (Cornell UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the late 1940s, tens of thousands of people – mostly young male peasants – streamed to southeastern Poland to help build Nowa Huta, the largest and most ambitious of Stalinist “socialist cities”...

Yuval Levin, “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you went to college in the United States and took a Western Civ class, you’ve probably read at least a bit of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rig...

Lisa Bier, “Fighting the Current: The Rise of American Women’s Swimming, 1870-1926” (McFarland, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American women dominated the swimming competition at the London Olympics, earning a total of sixteen medals in seventeen events. This template of success was set already at the 1920 Games, the firs...

P. Bingham and J. Souza, “Death From a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe” (BookSurge, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Long ago, historians more or less gave up on “theories of history.” They determined that human nature was too unpredictable, cultures too various, and developmental patterns too evanescent for any ...

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...

Sana Aiyar, "Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora" (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2015), Sana Aiyer investigates how Indian diasporic actors influenced the course of Kenya’s political history, from partneri...

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...

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 ...

Lewis H. Siegelbaum, "Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian" (Northern Illinois UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This memoir by one of the foremost scholars of the Soviet period spans three continents and more than half a century?from the 1950s when Lewis Siegelbaum's father was a victim of McCarthyism up thr...

David Slucki, "My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons" (Wayne State UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons (Wayne State University Press, 2019), David Slucki, Assistant Professor in the Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program at the College of Charl...

Hennie van Vuuren, "Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit" (Hurst, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit(Hurst, 2019), Hennie van Vuuren examines the final decades of the apartheid regime in South Africa. He weaves together archival material,...

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...

Sandra Jean Graham, “Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry” (U Illinois Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What happened in popular entertainment when African Americans could access the stage after the Civil War? In Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (University of Illinois Press...

Richard E. Schroeder, “The Foundation of the CIA: Harry Truman, the Missouri Gang and the Origins of the Cold War” (U. Missouri Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The CIA is a well-known agency to say the least. It is a key part of the United States’ national security apparatus and has been for the past 70 years. The CIA’s reputation is mixed though. From 19...

Alexia Yates, “Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siecle Capital” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What comes to mind when you think of Paris in the nineteenth century? For me, its revolutionary politics, the circulation of increasing numbers of people and goods, a range of spectacular cultural ...

Scott Bruce, ed., “The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters” (Penguin, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Like so many Americans, I’m a big fan of the undead. I look forward to a night of nail-biting when a new episode of The Walking Dead airs and I get excited when Hollywood gears up for the next big-...

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 ...

Eugene N. Anderson, “Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eugene N. Anderson‘s new book offers an expansive history of food, environment, and their relationships in China. From prehistory through the Ming and beyond, Food and Environment in Early and Medi...

Jeffrey Church, “Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche” (Penn State Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeffrey Church is the author of Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche (Penn State Press 2012). The book won the Best First Book ...

Kate Buford, “Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe” (Bison Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you watched the U.S. broadcast of the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, you may have heard Matt Lauer and Bob Costas mention Jim Thorpe during Sweden’s entrance. Thorpe, arguably the b...

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 ...

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 ...

Roundtable Discussion of Jennifer Morgan's "Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery" (UPenn Press, 2004) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host Adam McNeil. Today is part 2 of my discussion about Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s 2004 Laboring Women...

Ken O. Opalo, "Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies (Cambridge University Press, 2019) examines the development of African legislatures from their colonial origins through indepen...

Erika Denise Edwards, "Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic" (U Alabama Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Argentina promotes itself as a country of European immigrants. This makes it an exception to other Latin American countries, which embrace a more mixed—African, Indian, European—heritage. Hiding in...

Donald Ostrowski, "Europe, Byzantium, and the 'Intellectual Silence' of Rus’ Culture" (Arc Humanities Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Europe, Byzantium, and the “Intellectual Silence” of Rus’ Culture (Arc Humanities Press, 2018), Dr. Donald Ostrowski pens a fresh look at an old question: Why did intellectual path of Medieval R...

Tita Chico, "The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Can science be seductive? According to Tita Chico, the answer is a resounding yes. In her new book, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment(Stanfor...

Randall Stephens, "The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock n’ Roll" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I was immediately drawn to the book The Devil’s Music by Dr. Randall Stephens, Associate Professor of British and American Studies at the University of Oslo. Dr. Stephens and I came across one anot...

Sue Prideaux, “I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche” (Tim Duggan Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Like most philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche is better known for his ideas than for the life he led. In I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), Sue Prideaux details the events ...

Lisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the con...

Robert Hunt Ferguson, “Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi” (U of Georgia Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In an unlikely place at an unlikely time, a group of black and white former sharecroppers, socialist organizers, and Christian reformers began an agricultural experiment in pursuit of economic subs...

Kiran Klaus Patel, “The New Deal: A Global History” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are as many New Deals as there are books on the subject. Yet only recently have historians begun to dig into the international dimensions of the New Deal. Kiran Klaus Patel is one of those hi...

Karen Tani, “States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights and American Governance, 1935-1972” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What new can there be to say about the New Deal? Perhaps more than you think. Join us as Karen Tani talks about her new book, States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights and American Governance, 1935-197...

Domna Stanton, “The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing” (Ashgate, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Domna Stanton‘s latest book The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing (Ashgate, 2014) is a series of six case studies with important literary, historical, and theoret...

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 ...

Conevery Bolton Valencius, “The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story begins with Davy Crockett and his hunting dogs chasing a bear in 1826. The bear gets caught in an earthquake crack, an effect of the great Mississippi Valley earthquakes of 1811-1812 that...

John Burnham, “After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession w...

Amy Bass, “Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle Over W. E. B. Du Bois” (Minnesota UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I asked my wife if she knew who W. E. B. Du Bois was. She did, as would most Americans. I then asked her if she knew where Du Bois was born and raised. She did not, and most Americans wouldn’t eith...

Travis Vogan, "ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Travis Vogan, Associate Professor of Journalism and American Studies at the University of Iowa, and the author of ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television (...

Jennifer L. Morgan, "Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2004) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2004, Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press) was published. Sixteen years later, Morgan’s Laboring Women stands ...

Scott Laderman, "Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing" (U California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since 2020 has been such a horrifying year (and it’s only June!), it would be nice to relax a bit this summer and talk about something fun and apolitical like surfing. After all, what’s more chill ...

Steve Suitts, "Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement" (NewSouth Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

School choice, widely touted as a system that would ensure underprivileged youth have an equal opportunity in education, has grown in popularity in the past fifteen years. The strategies and rhetor...

Susan Neiman, “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil” (FSG, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Tennessee’s Governor recently ordered a holiday to celebrate the memory of confederate general Nathan Bedford Forest, a convicted war criminal who helped found the Ku Klax Klan, the New York T...

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, “Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets” (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are markets made? In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an assistant professor in ...

Max Felker-Kantor, "Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent years, the treatment of African Americans by police departments around the country has come under increased public scrutiny. As any student of the longer historical relationship between l...

Melissa Terras, “Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How have academics been represented in children’s books? In Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cult...

Melanie A. Kiechle, “Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America” (U Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Melanie Kiechle‘s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (University of Washington Press, 2017) takes us into the cellars, rivers, gutters and similar smelly rec...

Joel Blecher, “Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium” (U. Cal Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his marvelous new book Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium (University of California Press, 2017), Joel Blecher, Assistant Professor of History at George Washington Un...

Sarah Eltantawi, “Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution” (U. California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few images attached to Islam and to the Islamic legal tradition (the Sharia) in particular are more often and more disturbingly sensationalized than that of the stoning punishment. In her riveting ...

Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle, “The Art of the Bible: Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World” (Thames and Hudson, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On today’s program, I talk with Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle about their new book, The Art of the Bible Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World, published by Thames and Hudson (and di...

Patrick Hagopian, “American Immunity: War Crime and the Limits of International Law” (U of Massachusetts Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After World War II, the newly formed United Nations and what might be called a global community of nations that included the United States, worked to create a more extensive code of international l...

Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos, “Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America” (Oxford UP 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos are the authors of Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2014). McAdam is The Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of ...

Darrin M. McMahon, “Divine Fury: A History of Genius” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Here’s an odd thing: there really haven’t been any universally-acclaimed geniuses since Einstein. At least I can’t think of any. Really smart people, yes. But geniuses per se, no. It seems Einstein...

Michael Haykin, “The Reformers and Puritans as Spiritual Mentors” (Joshua Press, 2012 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Haykin‘s book The Reformers and Puritans as Spiritual Mentors (Joshua Press, 2012) attempts to create a “useable past” by highlighting the lives of several Reformers and Puritans. Dr. Hayki...

Patrick Manning, “The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture” (Columbia UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Africans were the first migrants because they were the first people. Some 60,000 years ago they left their homeland and in a relatively short period of time (by geological and evolutionary standard...

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...

Muhammed Fraser-Rahim, "America’s Other Muslims" (Lexington Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

America's Other Muslims: Imam W.D. Mohammed, Islamic Reform, and the Making of American Islam explores the oldest and perhaps the most important Muslim community in America, whose story has receive...

B. L. Johnson and M. M. Quinlan, "You’re Doing it Wrong!?Mothering, Media and Medical Expertise" (Rutgers UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

New mothers face a barrage of confounding decisions during the life-cycle of early motherhood which includes... Should they change their diet or mindset to conceive? Exercise while pregnant? Should...

L. Benjamin Rolsky, "The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As someone who grew up watching All in the Family and Sanford and Son, I’ve long been familiar with Norman Lear and his work. What I didn’t know, as a young child sitting cross-legged in front of t...

Stuart Schrader, "?Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing?" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Following World War II, in the midst of global decolonization and intensifying freedom struggles within its borders, the United States developed a worldwide police assistance program that aimed to ...

Tricia Starks, "Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks explores these themes as well as the connections ...

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...

Roland Philipps, “A Spy Named Orphan: the Enigma of Donald Maclean” (W.W. Norton, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Donald Maclean was one of the most treacherous and productive – for Moscow spies of the Cold War era and a key member of the infamous “Cambridge Five” spy ring, yet the complete extent of this shy,...

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...

Daniel J. Sharfstein, “Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War” (Norton, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law and History at Vanderbilt University, narrates a postbellum struggle that raged in the Northern Rockies in Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis...

Eric Kurlander, “Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea that there is some unholy connection between Nazism and occultism has a lengthy history. It long predates 1933, when the National Socialist party took power in Germany. But what’s behind t...

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...

George Makari, “Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind” (Norton, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (Norton, 2014), the psychoanalyst and innovative historian, George Makari speaks to us about the dramatic history of the invention of ...

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...

Jennifer Sessions, “By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria” (Cornell UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whose business was war. They were conquerors, and c...

Isaac Campos, “Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs” (UNC Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Isaac Campos is the author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Campos is an assistant professor of history at the Universit...

David Laskin, “The Long Way Home. An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War” (HarperCollins, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One night my wife and I were on the road, staying in a hotel in I-don’t-remember-where. I woke up in the middle of the night to find said wife missing. Happily, I saw a light under the bathroom doo...

Adam Kotsko, "Neoliberalism's Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s hard to avoid conversations about ‘neoliberalism’ these days. The meaning of the term—indeed its very existence—is hotly contested. Adam Kotsko argues in Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Politic...

Alexander Kaye, "The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism is a problem shared by many modern states. This is certainly true of the State of Israel, where the religious-secular schism provok...

Minou Arjomand, "Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment (Columbia University Press, 2020), Minou Arjomand provides a startling account of the many intersections between theatre an...

Sohaira Siddiqui, "Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her intimidatingly brilliant new book Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Sohaira Siddiqui conducts a masterful analys...

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, "She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman" (37 Ink, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Harriet Tubman is best known as one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad. As a leading abolitionist, her bravery and selflessness has inspired generations in the continuing str...

Rachel B. Herrmann, "No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When the British explored the Atlantic coast of America in the 1580s, their relations with indigenous peoples were structured by food. The newcomers, unable to sustain themselves through agricultur...

Patrick Sharma, "Robert McNamara’s Other War: The World Bank and International Development" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert McNamara is best remembered today for his momentous term as Secretary of Defense in the 1960s. Often overlooked because of this is his even longer tenure as president of the World Bank, one ...

David E. Fishman, “The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis” (ForeEdge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (ForeEdge, 2017), David E. Fishman, Professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in N...

Ronald P. Loftus, “The Turn Against the Modern: The Critical Essays of Taoka Reiun (1870-1912)” (Association for Asian Studies, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Taoka Reiun (1870-1912) was a literary critic and thinker who was active from the early 1890s in Meiji period Japan. Not satisfied with the meaning of bunmei kaika (“civilization and enlightenment”...

Angus McLaren, “Playboys and Mayfair Men: Crime, Class, Masculinity, and Fascism in 1930s London” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In December of 1937, four men robbed a representative of the diamond company Cartier of eight diamond rings in the Hyde Park Hotel. What made this crime unique was the identity of the perpetrators:...

Robert M. Browning Jr., “Lincoln’s Trident: The West Gulf Blockading Squadron during the Civil War” (U. of Alabama Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though the U.S. Navy’s blockade of the Confederacy has not received the attention devoted to the bloody campaigns on land, it was an important contributor to the Union’s victory in the Civil War. I...

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...

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...

Colonel Ty Seidule, “West Point History of the Civil War” (Simon and Schuster, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’re very fortunate to be joined by the editor of The West Point History of the Civil War (Simon and Schuster, 2014), the Head of the History Department at the United States Military Academy, Colo...

Nathaniel Millett, “The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World” (UP of Florida, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is a very timely book, coming as it does in the midst of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 — the war that gave birth to the maroon community of Prospect Bluff, Florida. In his book The ...

Roger Hart, “The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roger Hart‘s The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) is the first book-length study of linear algebra in imperial China, and is based on an astounding combination...

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew” (Yale UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I’ve got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You’ve heard of him. He was a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. But he didn’t (as the stereotype would suggest) become a...

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 ...

Joshua Greenberg, "Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is money? No, really, what is money? It turns out the answer is not so simple. During the course of the 20th century, most of us have gotten used to the notion of a single medium of exchange b...

Teresa Bergman, "The Commemoration of Women in the United States" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Teresa Bergman of the University of the Pacific on The Commemoration of Women in the United States: Remembering Women in Public...

Amy Shira Teitel, "Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA" (Bloomsbury, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Shira Teitel talks about Apollo and the community of people who are deeply attached to space history. Teitel is a spaceflight historian and the creator of the YouTube Channel, Vintage Space. Sh...

Emily Wilson, trans., "The Odyssey" (Norton, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, ho...

Thomas A. Foster, "Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men (University of Georgia Press, 2019) is the first book-length study of sexual violence against enslaved men. Scholars have extensively documented ...

Leslie Hahner, "To Become an American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early 20th Century" (Michigan State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they)--Assistant Professor, Dept. of Communication at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Leslie Hahner--Associate Professor, Dept. of Communicati...

Vennessa Hearman, “Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia” (NUS Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This interview is the fourth and and final interview in a short series of podcasts about the mass violence in Indonesia.  Earlier this year I talked with Geoff Robinson, Jess Melvin and Kate McGreg...

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 ...

What Role Did World War I Play in Women Gaining the Right to Vote? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the fifth podcast of Arguing History, Lynn Dumenil and Christopher Capozzola consider the relationship between America’s involvement in World War I and the granting of women the right to vote. A...

Simone Muller, “Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Simone Muller’s Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (Columbia University Press, 2016) is a superb account of the laying of submarine telegraph cables in ...

James Alexander Dun, “Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America” (U. Penn Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Alexander Dun is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. His book Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 201...

Ron Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anniversaries are funny things. Sometimes, as with the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, they are accompanied by a flood of discussion and debate.  Other times they are ...

Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth” ( from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Evolution is among the most powerful ideas in the natural sciences. Indeed, the evolutionary theoristTheodosius Dobzhansky famouslysaid nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evoluti...

Denis Kozlov, “Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Russia’s collective memory, the Stalin terror is often remembered and referred to by its most grueling year: “1937.” Following Stalin’s death and the shocking revelations about his regime expose...

Jesse Rhodes, “An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind” (Cornell UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jesse Rhodes‘ book An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind (Cornell University Press, 2012). The book synthesizes nearly forty years of US political history. It...

Joel Wolfe, “Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Here’s something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe’s terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford, 2010): the United States and Brazil have a lot in common. Both hived off ...

Jeppe Mulich, "In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeppe Mulich's new book, In A Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean (Cambridge University Press, 2020) highlights the revolutionary fervor, political turmoil, confli...

Sören Urbansky, "Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The fact that the vast border between China and Russia is often overlooked goes hand-in-hand with a lack of understanding of the ordinary citizens in these much-discussed places, who often lose out...

Hilde Løvdal Stephens, "Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Crusade for the Christian Home" (U Alabama Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Hilde Løvdal Stephens is a Visiting Associate Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Her first book is titled Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Cru...

Bryant Simon, "The Hamlet Fire: A Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives" (The New Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bryant Simon, Professor of History at Temple University, discusses his new book, The Hamlet Fire: A Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (The New Press, 2017), and the tragic cons...

Alexander L. Hinton, "Man or Monster?: The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer" (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Can justice heal? Must there be justice in order to heal? Is there such a thing as justice, something to be striven for regardless of context? Alexander L. Hinton thinks through these questions in ...

James W. Pardew, "Peacemakers: American Leadership and the End of Genocide in the Balkans" (U Kentucky Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book  Peacemakers: American Leadership and the End of Genocide in the Balkans (University of Kentucky Press, 2017), Ambassador James W. Pardew describes the role of the U.S. involvement in e...

James O'Toole, "The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good" (HarperBusiness, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is the University of Chicago-blessed, "greed is good" near-term profits approach to business wearing out its welcome? James O'Toole's The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pione...

Kiara M. Vigil, “Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880-1930” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the United States of America today, debates among, between, and within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizen...

Artemy M. Kalinovsky, “Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan” (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Artemy Kalinovsky’s new book Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) examines post war Soviet Tajikistan, sit...

David Stevenson, “1917: War, Peace, and Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), David Stevenson examines a pivotal chapter of the First World War. Two and a half years of death and destruction had brought the...

Melvin R. Adams, “Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation” (Washington State University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incident highlighted the costs and challenges of cle...

Leon Wildes, “John Lennon vs The U.S.A.: The Inside Story of the Most Bitterly Contested and Influential Deportation Case in United States History” (Ankerwycke, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Leon Wildes is the author of John Lennon vs The U.S.A.: The Inside Story of the Most Bitterly Contested and Influential Deportation Case in United States History (Ankerwycke 2016). Wildes is an imm...

Jennifer Bain, “Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of Medieval Composer” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hildegard of Bingen was many things: a religious leader, a prolific letter-writer, a visionary prophet, possibly a compiler of medical lore, and certainly one of the most important composers of the...

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 ...

Julie Berebitsky, “Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power and Desire” (Yale University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How to research the history of sexual harassment in the office, when the term sexual harassment was only invented in 1975 and it was long tabou to even use the word sex in conversation? Using an ar...

David Davis, “Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush: The 1908 Olympic Marathon and the Three Runners Who Launched a Sporting Craze” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

26.2 is one of the most recognizable numbers in sports. It is also a curious number. The length of the marathon race is the only distance in track that is still measured in English units. Yards hav...

David Aaronovitch, “Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in the Shaping of Modern History” (Penguin, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In preparation for this interview I watched the documentary (that’s what the producers call it, anyway) “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup.” Of course it’s absolutely loony. In fact, it’s so loon...

Victoria Phillips, "Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Victoria Phillips adeptly tells the story of Martha Graham's role as diplomat, arts innovator, and dancer. Her book Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy (Oxford UP, 2019) i...

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...

Brian DeMare, "Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many people outside China, and indeed many urbanites living in the country, rarely think about its vast rural areas. Yet today’s People’s Republic in many ways owes existence to the countryside whe...

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...

Cara New Daggett, "Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke UP, 2019), Cara New Daggett suggests that reassessing our relationships with fossil fuels in the face of climate cha...

Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, "This Is Really War: The Incredible True Story of a Navy Nurse POW in the Occupied Philippines" (Chicago Review Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, This Is Really War: The Incredible True Story of a Navy Nurse POW in the Occupied Philippines (Chicago Review Press, 2019), Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi presents the largely unknown sto...

Michael Desch, "Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To mobilize America’s intellectual resources to meet the security challenges of the post–9/11 world, US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates observed that “we must again embrace eggheads and ideas....

Hugh Cagle, “Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysis of the production of the tropics as an idea and...

Nicole Von Germeten, “Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico” (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico (University of California Press, 2018), Nicole Von Germeten explains the most important changes, in both ideas and practices, over three ...

Kathryn A. Sloan, “Death in the City: Suicide and the Social Imaginary in Modern Mexico” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her recent book Death in the City: Suicide and the Social Imaginary in Modern Mexico (University of California Press, 2017), Kathryn A. Sloan explores ideas and discourses surrounding the suicid...

Allan H. Pasco, “Balzac, Literary Sociologist” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Balzac, Literary Sociologist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Allan H. Pasco explores the talents of the writer whose reputation has been primarily based on his extraordinary gift to compose captivat...

Patrick Jory, “Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jataka and the Idea of the Perfect Man” (SUNY Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jataka and the Idea of the Perfect Man (SUNY Press, 2016; in paperback from 2017), Patrick Jory offers a compelling reinterpretation of religious te...

Joan Judge, “Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press” (U of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joan Judge‘s wonderful new book takes readers into the pages of the Funu shibao (the Women’s Eastern Times), a “Shanghai-based, nationally distributed, protocommercial, gendered journal that was c...

Hasia Diner, “Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way” (Yale University Press, 2015). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries witnessed a mass migration which carried millions of Jews from central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire ...

Sunil S. Amrith, “Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When historians think oceanically, when they populate their books with characters that include seas and monsoons along with human beings, what results is a very different way of thinking about time...

Christina Snyder, “Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America” (Harvard UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most readers are probably more familiar with the context of slavery or captivity in the context the African slave trade than in the Americas. Some may assume that slavery in the Americas was exclus...

Charles King, “The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There’s a concept I find myself coming back to again and again–“speciation.” It’s drawn from the vocabulary of evolutionary biology and means, roughly, the process by which new species arise. Speci...

Lamont Lindstrom, "Tanna Times: Islanders in the World" (U Hawaii Press, 2021) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For four decades, Lamont "Monty" Lindstrom has conducted research on the island of Tanna in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu. Considered by outsiders to be incredibly exotic, Tanna attracts tourists w...

Isabella Cosse, "Mafalda: A Social And Political History of a Global Comic" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Isabella Cosse’s Mafalda: A Social And Political History of a Global Comic (Duke University Press) is the definitive account of the most famous comic from Latin America, the Argentine strip Mafalda...

Joe Geisner, "Writing Mormon History: Historians and Their Books" (Signature Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every great book has a great backstory. In Joe Geisner’s new edited work, Writing Mormon History: Historians and Their Books (Signature Books, 2020), well-known historians describe their journeys o...

Sarah Stockwell, "The British End of the British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Great Britain was forced to give up the bulk of its vast, globe-spanning empire. While most histories of this process have examined it from the perspective...

Aurélie Basha i Novosejt, "I Made Mistakes: Robert McNamara's Vietnam War Policy, 1960-1968 (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Speaking to an advisor in 1966 about America's escalation of forces in Vietnam, American Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara confessed: 'We've made mistakes in Vietnam … I've made mistakes. But...

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...

Christopher Herbert, "Gold Rush Manliness: Race and Gender on the Pacific Slope" (U Washington Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Not all gold rushes are created equal, argues Christopher Herbert, Associate Professor of History at Columbia Basin College. Dr. Herbert’s new book, Gold Rush Manliness: Race and Gender on the Paci...

Victoria Lamont, “Westerns: A Women’s History” (U Nebraska Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Westerns are having a bit of a moment in the early twenty-first century. Westworld was recently nominated for eight Emmys, the hit show Deadwood is slated for a return to television in the next few...

Charles Hughes, “Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South” (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As America changed in the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, the Southern music industry was changing as well. The music studios of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals–known as the “country-soul ...

Monica Mattfeld, “Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship” (Penn State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Monica Mattfeld’s Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State University Press, 2017) explores the complex relationship between men and their horses, and r...

Brigitte Le Normand, “Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

NB: An earlier version of this podcast has been replaced with a new file in which the the technical problems of the first were corrected. -NBn, 7/11/17 At the end of World War II, Belgrade, the ca...

Jonathan Brooks Platt, “Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard” (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) by Jonathan Brooks Platt explores the national celebrations around the centennia...

Arthur Dudney, “Delhi: Pages From A Forgotten History” (Hay House India, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Delhi: Pages From A Forgotten History (Hay House India, 2015) by Arthur Dudney tells the story of India’s capital and beyond through the lens of Persian literary culture. A lively read written for ...

Justin Martin, “Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians” (Da Capo Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Biography is, both etymologically and in its conventional forms, the writing of a life. But what is the role of place within that? And how do the stories of lives- some of them well known, others l...

Brian Jay Jones, “Jim Henson: The Biography” (Ballantine Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the field of children’s programming, few people- with the possible exception of Fred Rogers- are as beloved as Jim Henson, a contributor to Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live, but most famous...

Matthew Lenoe, “The Kirov Murder and Soviet History” (Yale University Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On 1 December 1934, Leonid Nikolaev, a disgruntled Bolshevik Party member, shot Sergei Kirov in the back of the head as the Leningrad Party boss approached his office in Smolny. The murder sent sho...

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...

Justin Gage, "We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Writing to U.S. President Grover Cleveland in 1888, Oglala Lakota leaders Little Wound, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, and Red Cloud insisted upon a simple yet significant demand to allow western ...

T. P. Kaplan and W. Gruner, "Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust" (Berghahn, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 20 years of studying the Holocaust, it didn’t occurr to me that German officials might, when petitioned by German Jews or by Germans advocating for German Jews, change their minds. But it turns ...

Henry M. Cowles, "The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made ...

Eddie Michel, "The White House and White Africa" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence was one of the last crises of formal imperialism. British settlers in present-day Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia, refused to accept demands fr...

Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...

John D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story" (National Geographic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John D. Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the cha...

Michael A. Schoeppner, "Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between 1822 and 1857, eight Southern states barred the ingress of all free black maritime workers. According to lawmakers, they carried a 'moral contagion' of abolitionism and black autonomy that ...

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...

Andre Magnan, “When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade” (U British Columbia Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), André Magnan connects the cultivation of wheat on the Canadian prairies to the c...

Alexandra Dellios, “Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre” (Melbourne UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Alexandra Dellios, a Lecturer in Heritage Studies at the Australian National University,...

William Davenport Mercer, “Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty” (U. Oklahoma Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

William Davenport Mercer‘s Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) argues that if we want to understand how ...

Colin Holmes, “Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the Second World War millions of Britons tuned in nightly to hear the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw coming from Nazi Germany. Though the label was broadly applied to a number of English-speakin...

Patrick Bowen, “A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Vol 1: White American Muslims before 1975” (Brill, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the current political moment there is widespread anti-Muslim rhetoric and it would be easy to conclude that a large portion of white Americans see Islam at odds with American values. But a longe...

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...

Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul, “The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing” (Crown, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Atlantic magazine recently asked its readers to name the greatest athlete of all time. The usual suspects were present among the nominees: Jesse Owens, Pele, Wayne Gretzky, Don Bradman. Given t...

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...

Nicholas Thompson, “The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War” (Henry Holt, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I met George Kennan twice, once in 1982 and again in about 1998. On both occasions, I found him tough to read. He was a very dignified man–I want to write “correct”–but also quite distant, even cer...

Jeremy Black, "George III: Madness and Majesty" (Penguin, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

King of Britain for sixty years and the last king of what would become the United States, George III inspired both hatred and loyalty and is now best known for two reasons: as a villainous tyrant f...

Joshua B. Freeman, "Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World" (W. W. Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In an accessible and timely work of scholarship, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman's Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (W. W. Norton) tells the story of the...

Nathan G. Alexander, "Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is modern racism a product of secularization and the decline of Christian universalism? The debate has raged for decades, but up to now, the actual racial views of historical atheists and freethink...

Peter Cole, "Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area" (U Illinois Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Illinois Press, 2018) is a fascinating, densely researched account of dockworkers and their organized res...

Eileen Boris, "Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nati...

Kimberly Welch, "Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kimberly Welch is the author of Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Welch is Assistant Professor of History and Assistant Professor of Law a...

Robert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil.  In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squarely into the mainstream of Walmart and Walgreen...

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, “Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jack Benny was one of the first crossover stars in broadcast comedy, rising from the vaudeville circuit to star in radio, film, and television. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley chronicles Benny’s career in he...

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. ...

Hendrik Meijer, “Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a United States senator in the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Vandenberg was one of the leading Republican voices shaping the nation’s foreign policy. Though initially a staunch isolationist, as Hendri...

David Matthews, “Medievalism: A Critical History” (Boydell and Brewer, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A revealing exploration of representative modes of medievalism, Medievalism: A Critical History (Boydell & Brewer; hardcover 2015, paperback 2017), by David Matthews, examines the people, instituti...

Matthew Pauly, “Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew Pauly’s Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934 (University of Toronto Press, 2014) offers a detailed investigation of the language policy–officiall...

Luke Nichter and Douglas Brinkley, “The Nixon Tapes: 1973” (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Luke Nichter and Douglas Brinkley are the editors of The Nixon Tapes: 1973 (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt 2015). Nichter is associate professor of history at Texas A&M University and Brinkley is prof...

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...

Susan D. Carle, “Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians tell stories, and stories have beginnings and ends. Most human eras, however, are not so neat. Their beginnings and ends tend to blend into one another. This is why historians are often ...

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...

Ben Kiernan, “Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur” (Yale UP, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chimps, our closest relatives, kill each other. But chimps do not engage in anything close to mass slaughter of their own kind. Why is this? There are two possible explanations for the difference. ...

Sumit Guha, "History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result o...

Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, "Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (University of California Press), Gema Kloppe-Santamaría examines the history of ...

Allan Downey, "The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood" (UBC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Allan Downey, Associate Professor of History and Indigenous Studies at McMaster University, and author of The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood (U...

Nicholas Blincoe, "More Noble Than War: A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine" (Bold Type Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas Blincoe’s More Noble Than War: A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine (Bold Type Books, 2019) is a beautifully narrated and written history of a century of conflict between pre-state Jews an...

Russell Potter, "Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-year Search" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1845, two British naval ships left England with 129 men in search of the Northwest Passage. They were never heard from again. The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition shocked the world. Doze...

Gregory Borchard, "A Narrative History of the American Press" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The American press is older than the United States itself. Ever since its catalytic role in the American Revolution, journalism has evolved to meet changing political, economic, and technological d...

Rósa Magnúsdóttir, "Enemy Number One: The United States of American in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Enemy Number One: The United States of American in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Dr. Rósa Magnúsdóttir of Aarhus University, explores depictions of A...

Gill Bennett, “The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still resonates nearly one-hundred years after it was wr...

Hala Auji, “Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut” (Brill, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Middle Eastern history, the printing press has been both over- and under-assigned significance as an agent of social change. Hala Auji’s Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Pr...

Stephen G. Craft, “American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy” (Kentucky UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On May 23, 1957, US Army Sergeant Robert Reynolds was acquitted of murdering Chinese officer Liu Ziran in Taiwan. Reynolds did not deny shooting Liu but claimed self-defense and, like all members o...

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...

Bryan K. Roby, “The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948-1966” (Syracuse UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948-1966 (Syracuse University Press, 2015), Bryan K. Roby, fellow at the Centre for Judaic Studies at the University of M...

Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, “Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Phelps is an associate professor at the University of Nottingham and co-author of Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Phelp...

Tracy Leavelle, “The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America” (U Penn Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Studies of Christian missions can easily fall into two different traps: either one-sidedly presenting the missionaries as heroes saving benighted savages or portraying them as villains carrying out...

Agostino Cilardo, “The Early History of Islamili Jurisprudence” (I. B. Tauris, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Al-QÄ?á¸?Ä« al-Nu῾mÄ?n (d. 363/974) was the primary architect of IsmÄ?῾īlÄ« jurisprudence which was formed under the Fatamids. The Early History of Ismaili Jurisprudence (I. B. Tauris, 2013) p...

Brian Ingrassia, “The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football” (University Press of Kansas, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During this week of the 4th of July, it’s appropriate to mark America’s national holiday with a podcast about that most American of sports: college football. As past guests on the podcast have expl...

Brian Balogh, “A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in 19th-Century America” (Cambridge UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Americans don’t like “big government” right? Not exactly. In the Early Republic (1789 to the 1820s) folks were quite keen on building up the (you guessed it) republic. As in res publica, the “thing...

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...

Wendy Moore, "No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s guest is journalist and author, Wendy Moore. Her new book, No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I (Basic Books) expl...

Imre Salusinszky, "The Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga" (Melbourne UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

"Every morning of my life in the past few years I would wake with the thought, I’m a murderer. I have no right to enjoy life.” Evan Pederick speaking to psychiatrist William Barclay in prison about...

Donald L. Miller, "Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Donald L. Miller explains in great detail how Grant ultimately succeeded in taking the city and turning the tide ...

Wang Gungwu, "Home is Not Here" (NUS Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wang Gungwu has long been recognized as a world authority on the history of China and the overseas Chinese. His work has been inspired by his own experience growing up Chinese in Southeast Asia, bu...

Betsy Perabo, "Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War" (Bloomsbury, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As Russian militarism becomes increasingly intertwined with Russian Orthodoxy theology in the 21st century, the history of the Church’s relationship to war and its justification becomes particularl...

Nancy Yunhwa Rao, "Chinatown Opera Theater in North America" (U Illinois Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of popular entertainment in American immigrant communities is only just beginning to be told. Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Yunhwa Rao from University of Illinois Pres...

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...

David Neiwert, “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump” (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Investigative journalist and Northwest correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center, David Neiwert has been covering the radical right-wing for decades. In Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical...

Lisa Brooks, “Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lisa Brooks, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College, recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Ph...

David R. Mayhew, “The Imprint of Congress” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week on the podcast we have a true political science legend. David R. Mayhew is the author of such political science greats as Congress: The Electoral Connection, Divided We Govern, and Partis...

Marc Steinberg, “England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marc Steinberg is a professor of sociology at Smith College. His latest book, England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a resp...

Eric Foner, “Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad” (Norton, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this podcast I talk with Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University about his book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (W. W. Norton &...

Orit Halpern, “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern‘s new book traces the emergence of the “communicative objec...

Timothy J. Brook, “Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer” (Bloomsbury, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story opens with a closing and closes with an opening. The closing is the sale of the map of Martin Waldseemuller, “America’s birth certificate,” for $10 million to the Library of Congress. The...

Ethan Segal, “Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What did money mean to the people of medieval Japan? In Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), Ethan Segal takes readers thro...

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...

Sebastian Strangio, "In the Dragon's Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For centuries Southeast Asia has enjoyed a relatively pleasant relationship with China, its massive neighbor to the north. While Chinese merchants and laborers were common throughout the region, wi...

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...

Thomas C. Field Jr. et al., "Latin America and the Global Cold War" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Latin America and the Global Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) analyzes more than a dozen of Latin America’s forgotten encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Communist world, and b...

Yaakov Katz, "Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power" (St. Martin's Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With the world’s attention riveted to the nuclear threat from Iran, Yaakov Katz’s new book could not be more timely. In Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Pow...

Bruce Riedel, "Beirut 1958: How America's Wars in the Middle East Began" (Brookings, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In July 1958, U.S. Marines stormed the beach in Beirut, Lebanon, ready for combat. Farcically. they were greeted by vendors and sunbathers. Fortunately, the rest of their mission—helping to end Leb...

Danny Orbach, "Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan" (Cornell UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Danny Orbach’s Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan (Cornell University Press, 2017) provides new insights into the origins of the insubordination that plagued and character...

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...

Sylvia Chan-Malik, “Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam” (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of Muslims in America has primarily been told through the experiences of men and often revolves around narratives of immigration. Sylvia Chan-Malik, Assistant Professor of American Studie...

Barry Eidlin, “Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada” (Cambridge University Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do unions and ideas around labor compare between the U.S. and Canada? And how did they come to be as they are today? In his new book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada (C...

Eddy Portnoy, “Bad Rabbi And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Bad Rabbi And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017), Eddy Portnoy, Academic Advisor and Exhibitions Curator at the YIVO Institute for Yiddish Re...

Thomas Hazlett, “The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What better way to explore the history of media regulation than to go on a journey with the former chief economist of the FCC? Prior to introduction of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927, the rad...

Tevi Troy, “Shall We Wake the President?: Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office” (Lyons Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What happens during a presidential transition should a disaster occur? Who is in charge of addressing the 3am phone call, the outgoing or incoming administration? Tevi Troy is the author of Shall W...

James A. Benn, “Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History” (U of Hawaii Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James A. Benn‘s new book is a history of tea as a religious and cultural commodity in China before it became a global commodity in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Tang and Song dynasties (w...

Sarah M. Allen, “Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah M. Allen‘s new book looks at the literature of tales in eighth- and ninth-century China. Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China (Harvard University ...

Andrea S. Goldman, “Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing 1770-1900” (Stanford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Before the twentieth century, opera was a kind of cultural glue: it was both a medium of mass-communication, and a powerful shaper and reflector of the popular imagination in the way TV and film ar...

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...

Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, “Natural Experiments of History” (Harvard UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I remember telling my wife, the mathematician, that historians typically work on one time and place their entire careers. If you begin, say, as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (as I did), you ar...

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...

Postscript: Shirley Chisholm as Principled Political Strategist from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America. “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. “...

Aaron Kamugisha, "Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Aaron Kamugisha reads CLR James and Sylvia Wynter to glean from them ways to navigate the “beyond” of coloniality. In his new book Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intel...

Todd Shepard, "Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979" (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Departing from the bold and compelling claim that we cannot fully understand the histories of decolonization and the so-called “sexual revolution” apart from one another, Todd Shepard’s Sex, France...

Jay Driskell, "Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School" (UVA Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor Jay Driskell of Hood College, author of Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (University of Virginia Press,...

Elaine Hampton and Cynthia Ontiveros, "Copper Stain: ASARCO’s Legacy in El Paso" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Copper Stain: ASARCO’s Legacy in El Paso (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Elaine Hampton and Cynthia Ontiveros tell the story of how a Mexican American community in El Paso have fought back...

Kathleen Burk, "The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires, 1783-1972" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Throughout modern history, British and American rivalry has gone hand in hand with common interests. Now renown diplomatic historian Professor Kathleen Burk in her newest book, The Lion and the Eag...

Raz Segal, “Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown and Mass Violence, 1914-1945” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Telling the history of the Holocaust in Hungary has long meant telling the story of 1944.  Raz Segal, in his new book Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown and Mass Violence, 1914-1945...

A. James McAdams, “Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is there a difference between the Communist Party as an idea and the Communist Party in practice? A. James McAdams thinks so and takes the global approach to history to write a political and intell...

Gregory Laski, “Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gregory Laski approaches the concept of democracy in his text, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2018) from a variety of dimensions and perspectiv...

Susanna Forrest, “The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of humanity is intertwined with that of the horse to such a degree that it is no exaggeration to say that the existence of either species as we know it today is a product of its relatio...

Mary Chapman, “Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton” (McGill-Queens UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016) is a collection of works–previously published and newly discovered–pro...

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 ...

Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch, eds., “We are Strong: Wartime Origins and the Future United Nations” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch are the co-editors of We Are Strong: Wartime Origins and the Future United Nations (Routledge, 2015). Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science and Director E...

Todd H. Weir, “Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview” (Palgrave, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I always learn something when I interview authors, but in this chat with Todd H. Weir I learned something startling: I’m a monist. What is more, you may be a monist too and not even know it. Do yo...

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...

Julian E. Zelizer, “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From WWII to the War on Terrorism” (Basic Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to forget the “public” part and concentrate on the “...

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...

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...

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...

Eric Lomazoff, "Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Lomazoff has written a kind of detective novel about the national bank controversy during the early years of the new republic. Lomazoff poses, in the introduction, and at the start of each cha...

Joseph F. O'Callaghan, "Alfonso X, the Justinian of His Age" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While monarchs throughout history used their power to make laws as a tool for governing their realms, rarely did they undertake the long and detailed work of drawing up an entire legal code. One of...

Ann Powers, "Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music" (Dey St. Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey St. Books, HarperCollins, 2017), Ann Powers explores the rich and, at times, unexpected intersections of love, sex...

Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunni...

Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tok...

Geoffrey Robinson, “The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-1966” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I first assigned Joshua Oppenheimer’s film “The Act of Killing” for my course in Comparative Genocide at Newman.  The movie is a documentary about the mass violence in Indonesia beginning in 1965. ...

Adam Mestyan, “Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Studies of Arab nationalism populate the field of Middle Eastern studies, perhaps even overpopulate it. However, what Adam Mestyan does in Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late...

“Latino City Part II: An Interview with Llana Barber.” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945-2000 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Dr. Llana Barber explores the transformation of Lawrence into New Engla...

Kathryn Kleppinger, “Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and Media in France, 1983-2013” (Liverpool UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathryn Kleppinger’s Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the “paradox of ethnic minority writing” in the work o...

Heath W. Carter, “Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago” (Oxford University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Heath W. Carter‘s new book Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a bold interpretation of the origins of the American Soci...

Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, “The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn‘s An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010 (Oxford University Press, reprint edition 2014) offers what is in...

Glenn Feldman, “The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865-1944” (University of Alabama Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Glenn Feldman is the author of The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865-1944 (Alabama UP 2013). He is professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and...

Nwando Achebe, “The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe” (Indiana University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I saw Nwando Achebe‘s book The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Indiana University Press, 2011), I thought: “Really? A female king? Cool!” It turns out Ahebi Ugbabe was not only ...

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...

Antonia Bosanquet, "Minding their Place: Space and Religious Hierarchy in Ibn al-Qayyim’s A?k?m ahl al-dhimma" (Brill, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How was the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim communities theologically and spatially imagined in the premodern world? How did religious hierarchies map onto notions of place and spatial d...

Jacob Mundy, "Libya" (Polity Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jacob Mundy is associate professor of PCON at Colgate University He’s written a great book titled Libya, published in 2018 in Polity Presses' "Hot Spots in Global Politics" series. Jacob’s book is ...

Jill Strauss, "Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation" (Rutgers UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Race remains a potent and divisive force in our society. Whether it is the shooting of minority people by the police, the mass incarceration of people of color, or the recent KKK rallies that have ...

Maria Taroutina, "The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival" (Penn State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival (Penn State University Press, 2018), Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the...

Julia Nicholls, "Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871-1885" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871-1885 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), is the first comprehensive account of French revolutionary thought in the years between the crushing of ...

Benjamin Meiches, "The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (University of Minnesota Press, 2019),Benjamin Meiches takes a novel approach to the study of genocide by analyzing the ways in which ideas,...

Bhikkhu An?layo, "Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research" (Wisdom Publications, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In today’s podcast, I speak with German professor and Buddhist monk Bhikkhu An?layo about his book Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research (Wisdom Publications, 2018). Bhikkhu An?layo skillf...

David Pietrusza, “TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy” (Lyons Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza does just that in TR’s Last War: Theodore Rooseve...

Steven Hackel, “Junípero Serra: California’s Founding Father” (Hill and Wang, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Pope Francis visited the United States in 2015, he canonized the eighteenth-century Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, rekindling the smoldering controversy that surrounds this historical f...

Susan Smith-Peter, “Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia” (Brill, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Brill, 2017), Susan Smith Peter discusses the origins of the creation of distinct provincial ident...

Michael J. Hogan, “The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Biography” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As president John F. Kennedy enjoyed a remarkable degree of popularity, and in the decades since his assassination his standing has only grown in the public imagination. In The Afterlife of John Fi...

Robert Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (U. of Washington Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde’s waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Nietzsche, who argued around the same time, “art is...

Christopher Rea, “The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China” (University of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Rea‘s new book explores five kinds of laughter that emerged from the tumultuous first decades of China’s twentieth century: jokes, play, mockery, farce, and humor. The Age of Irreverenc...

Margaret D. Jacobs, “A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2012, a young Cherokee girl named Veronica became famous. The widespread and often coercive adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by non-Native families has long been known, discussed, a...

Thurston Clarke, “JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John F. Kennedy remains one of the most remembered and most enigmatic presidents in American history, perhaps precisely because, as Thurston Clarke writes in the preface of his new biography JFK’s ...

Koritha Mitchell, “Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930” (University of Illinois Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Koritha Mitchell‘s Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2012) is, as described on the publisher’s webpage, “...

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...

Peter Mandler, "The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did public demand shape education in the 20th century? In The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford UP, 2020), Peter Mandler, Prof...

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...

A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 2: Value Theory from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode (# 2), we discuss Eisler’s early years as a member of the Jewish bourgeoisie in turn-of-the-century Vienna with historian Steven Beller. We also hear from the closest living relativ...

Christopher J. Shepherd, "Haunted Houses and Ghostly Encounters: Ethnography and Animism in East Timor, 1860-1975" (NIAS Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anyone who tries to understand the history, religion, and especially the “culture” of Southeast Asia, will soon encounter the phenomenon of animism, the belief that landscapes, natural objects, tre...

Perla Guerrero, "Nuevo South: Asians, Latinas/os, and the Remaking of Place" (U Texas Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Perla Guerrero is the author of Nuevo South: Asians, Latinas/os, and the Remaking of Place (University of Texas Press, 2017). Nuevo South explores the history of an ever diversifying U.S. South by ...

Brian Haara, "Bourbon Justice: How Whiskey Law Shaped America" (Potomac Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bourbon whiskey has been around since nearly the beginning of the United States. Given that longevity, it has been part of the corporate law of the United States since the beginning of the corporat...

Kathleen Keller, "Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa" (U Nebraska Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathleen Keller’s new book, Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) is teeming with mysterious persons,...

Andrew M. Busch, “City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Austin, Texas has a reputation as a vibrant, youthful capital city buoyed economically and culturally by the University of Texas. In City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justi...

Eden Medina, “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics.  In the early 70’s, at the invitation of leftist presid...

Russell Shorto, “Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom” (Norton, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Russell Shorto‘s Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (Norton, 2017) is a history of many revolutions, kaleidoscopic turns through six individual lives. There is Cornplanter, a leader of th...

Mitchell Stephens, “The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th Century Journalism” (St. Martin’s, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mitchell Stephens‘s new book, The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th Century Journalism (St. Martins Press, 2017), could be described, in part, as an entertaining book of sto...

George T. Diaz, “Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling Across the Rio Grande” (U. of Texas Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling Across the Rio Grande (University of Texas Press, 2015) Professor George T. Diaz examines a subject that has received scant attention by historians, but...

John Casey, “The Nonprofit World: Civil Society and the Rise of the Nonprofit Sector” (Kumarian Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The nonprofit sector is growing, not just in the United States, but globally. In The Nonprofit World: Civil Society and the Rise of the Nonprofit Sector (Kumarian Press, 2015), John Casey demonstra...

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...

Peter Savodnik, “The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many people, the most important questions about the Kennedy assassination are “Who killed Kennedy?” and, if Lee Harvey Oswald did, “Was Oswald part of a conspiracy?” This is strange, because we...

John Harwood, “The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Philip Kretsedemas is the author of Migrants and Race in the US: Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside (Routledge, 2014). Kretsedemas is associate professor of sociology at University of Massach...

Harvey Schwartz, “Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU” (University of Washington Press, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of my favorite bumper stickers reads “Unions: the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend.” Indeed they did. Organized labor has had a rocky history in the U.S. It’s been hounded for leaning left, as...

Charles Allan McCoy, "Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS, and pandemic influenza are brutal reminders of the dangers of infectious disease. Comparing the development of disease control in Britain and the United States, from...

Lynn M. Thomas, "Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By 2024, global sales of skin lighteners are projected to reach more than $30 billion. Despite the planetary scale of its use, skin lightening remains a controversial cosmetic practice. Lynn M. Tho...

Pilar M. Herr, "Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in 19th-Century Chile" (U New Mexico Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pilar M. Herr’s new book Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile (University of New Mexico Press, 2019) places the independent Mapuche people and pro...

David Biggs, "Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam" (U Washington Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By now we all know that Vietnam is a country, not a war. But how have decades, and even centuries, of war impacted the land of this southeast Asian nation? Professor David Biggs of the University o...

Maria Cotera, "Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era" (U of Texas Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era(University of Texas Press, 2018), Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell have formulated a landm...

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, "They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. In her new book They Were Her Pr...

Jill Kelly, “To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996” (Michigan State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we talked with Jill Kelly about her new book To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996 published by Michigan State University Press in 2018. Her book i...

Matthew Restall, “When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History” (Ecco, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction—the prelude to the Spani...

Brian McCammack, “Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can we learn about African American life between the world wars if we center our attention on the parks and pleasuring grounds of the urban North? That is what historian Brian McCammack endeav...

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...

Orna Ophir, “On the Borderland of Madness: Psychosis, Psychoanalysis, and Psychiatry in Postwar USA” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When it comes to the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the United States, to paraphrase Luce Irigaray, one never stirs without the other. While Freud sent Theodore Reik across the ocean t...

John M. Kinder, “Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Kinder brings to life the challenges and problems faced by the disabled veteran in American history from the Civil War to the current day in his evocative book, Paying with Their Bodies: Ameri...

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 ...

John Roth and Peter Hayes, “The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve talked before on the show about how hard it is to enter into the field of Holocaust Studies. Just six weeks ago, for instance, I talked with Dan Stone about his thoughtful work analyzing and ...

Kelly Baker, “Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930” (University Press of Kansas, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If images of white robes, pointed hoods, and a burning cross represent racism and violence for you then you are not alone. But do they also evoke ideas of nationalism, Protestantism, and masculinit...

Sarah Ross, “The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England” (Harvard UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I’ll be honest: I have a Ph.D. in early modern European history from a big university you’ve probably heard of and I couldn’t name a single female writer of the Renaissance before I read Sarah Ross...

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...

Robert C. McGreevey, "Borderline Citizens: The United States, Puerto Rico, and the Politics of Colonial Migration" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Borderline Citizens: The United States, Puerto Rico, and the Politics of Colonial Migration (Cornell University Press 2018), Robert C. McGreevey explores the contested meaning and limits of citi...

James N. Green, "Exile Within Exiles: Herbert Daniel Gay Brazilian Revolutionary" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Exile Within Exiles: Herbert Daniel Gay Brazilian Revolutionary (Duke University Press, 2018), James N. Green tells the story of Herbert Daniel, a significant and complex figure in Brazilian lef...

Timothy Lehman, "Up the Trail: How Texas Cowboys Herded Longhorns and Became an American Icon" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1866, a sixteen year old cowboy—the name was literal in his case—named J.M. Daugherty bought 1,000 cattle, hired five cowboys, and headed north for Missouri. In Indian Territory, he took the lon...

Melissa McCormick, "The Tale of Genji: A Visual Companion" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums is the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. In The Tale of Genji. A Visual Companion, published by Princeton University Press in...

Bruce Van Orden, "We’ll Sing and We’ll Shout: The Life and Times of W. W. Phelps" (BYU, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a Latter Day Saint, you’ve probably heard of W. W. Phelps, and no doubt, you’ve probably sung some of his hymns. But did you know that he printed the Book of Commandments and other early ...

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...

Amy Sueyoshi, “Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American ‘Oriental'” (U Illinois Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American ‘Oriental’ (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Amy Sueyoshi argues that Americans did not always regard Chinese and Japanese in...

Ula Yvette Taylor, “The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Nation of Islam and other black nationalist groups are typically known for their male leaders. Men like the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Minister Malcolm X or Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey a...

Blake Atwood, “Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Iranian cinema has close connections to the 1979 Islamic revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini , explicitly pointed to the uses of cinema for religious and revolutionary political purposes. But Iranian fi...

Patrick Wolfe, “Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race” (Verso, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Widely known for his pioneering work in the field of settler colonial studies, Patrick Wolfe advanced the theory that settler colonialism was, “a structure, not an event.” In early 2016, Wolfe deep...

Janet Gyatso, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Janet Gyatso‘s new book is a masterfully researched, compellingly written, and gorgeously illustrated history of medicine in early modern Tibet that looks carefully at the relationships between med...

Tim Lacy, “The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and Great Books Idea” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tim Lacy is an assistant professor and academic advisor at Loyola University Chicago. His specialties are intellectual history, cultural history, and the history of education. He is co-founder of b...

Robert Yelle, “The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the nature of secularization? How distant are we from the magical world of the past? Perhaps, we are not as far as many people think. In the fascinating new book, The Language of Disenchant...

Nicolas Rosenthal, “Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles” (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The term “Indian Country” evokes multiple themes. Encompassing legal, geographic, and ideological dimensions, “Indian Country” is commonly understood to be a space outside of or surrounded by the b...

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 ...

Tamar Herzig, "A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Tamar Herzig, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, the Director of Tel Aviv University’s Morris E Curiel Institute for Europea...

Paige Glotzer, "How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paige Glotzer is the author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, published by Columbia University Press in 2020. How the Suburbs Were ...

Abigail Shinn, "Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning" (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why did early modern people change their religious affiliation? And how did they represent that change in writing? In this outstanding new book, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales...

Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg, "Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg’s coauthored Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2019) uses the fate of castles after the Meiji coup of 1868 as a ca...

Laura Alice Watt, "The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore" (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Wilderness,” “nature,” and their “preservation” are concepts basic to how the National Park Service organizes our relationship to American land. They are also contested concepts, geographer and en...

Deborah E. Lipstadt, "Antisemitism: Here and Now" (Schocken, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over the past decade, and especially in the last several years, anti-Semitic crimes have increased significantly. According to FBI Statistics, hate crimes against Jews in the US spiked 37% between ...

Steve Kornacki, “The Red and The Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism” (Ecco, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did American politics become so polarized? MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki points to clash of two larger-than-life characters in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, as the origin of our viciously...

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...

Richard Carwardine, “Lincoln’s Sense of Humor” (Southern Illinois UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many people today, the name Abraham Lincoln conjures up a mental image of a solemn but kindly statesman. Yet to his contemporaries, one of Lincoln’s defining traits was his humor, which he depl...

Brittney C. Cooper, “Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women” (U. Illinois Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Brittney C. Cooper, who is an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, explores the intellectual genealogy and geography of the work of African-American women ov...

J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, “Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On the eve of the 2016 election, it is worth reflecting on the history of women’s voting. Up to this weighty task is a new book by J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht. They are the authors of C...

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 ...

Bedross Der Matossian, “Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the Ottoman constitution, suspended earlier by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and initiated a new period of parliamentary politics in the Empire. Likewise, the re...

Darryl E. Flaherty, “Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan” (Harvard Asia Center, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In global narratives of modern legal history, Asia tends to fall short relative to Europe and the US. According to these narratives, while individuals in the West enjoyed political participation an...

Gregory A. Daddis, “No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ask any student or aficionado of the Vietnam War (1965-1972) for a top ten list of artifacts “unique” to the war, and chances are the phenomenon of “body counts” as a tool for measuring success in ...

Rebecca Manley, “To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War” (Cornell UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving masses of people around. Large population trans...

Audrey Truschke, “Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many, the history of the Mughal empire looms heavy over contemporary South Asian social imaginaries. The lightning rod figure within modern day myths about the past is the Mughal emperor Aurang...

Mona L. Siegel, "Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights After the First World" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are all familiar with the story of how in early 1919 heads of state and diplomats from around the world came to Paris to negotiate a peace settlement with a defeated Germany and its allies. Many...

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 ...

W. Caleb McDaniel, "Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her ...

Marko Geslani, "Rites of the God-King: ??nti and Ritual Change in Early Hinduism" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is “Vedic” fire sacrifice at odds with “Hindu” image worship? Through a careful study of ritual (?anti) texts geared towards appeasement of inauspicious forces (primarily the Atharva Veda and in th...

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia(New York University Press, 2019), Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, s...

Nathaniel Philbrick, “In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown” (Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most Americans do not appreciate the extent to which victory in the American Revolution was due to the leadership of a French aristocrat. As Nathaniel Philbrick demonstrates in his new book In the ...

Yoav Di-Capua, “No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Yoav Di-Capua‘s new book, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is narrative intellectual history at its best: a tale of friendship a...

Amos Goldberg, “Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his most recent work, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017), Amos Goldberg examines Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust—a subject that...

Ellen Wayland-Smith, “Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-set Table” (Picador Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ellen Wayland-Smith, a descendent of the Oneida community, teaches writing at the University of Southern California. Her book Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-set Table (Picador Press, 201...

Robert Peckham, “Epidemics in Modern Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Peckham’s Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores the crucial yet under-explored role that epidemics have played in both colonial and postcolonial Asia. At once ...

Paul Bjerk, “Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960-1964” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Let’s begin with what Paul Bjerk’s new book isn’t: “a biography or evaluation of Julius Nyerere.” Instead, according to a letter that Bjerk sent me in advance of our interview, Building a Peaceful ...

Kimberly A. Hamlin, “From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America” (U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age in ...

Mark R. Cheathem, “Andrew Jackson, Southerner” (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do most Americans know about Andrew Jackson, apart from that he’s on the $20 bill and that he apparently had great hair? Probably not much. Maybe that he was a two-term president who pioneered...

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. ...

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...

James C. Pearce, "The Use of History in Putin's Russia" (Vernon Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

History matters in Russia. It really matters, so much so that the state has a "historical policy" to help legitimize itself and support its policy agenda. The Use of History in Putin's Russia (Vern...

Alberto Harambour, "Soberanías fronterizas: Estados y capital en la colonización de Patagonia" (EUAC, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alberto Harambour's new book Soberanías Fronterizas. Estados y capital en la colonización de Patagonia (Argentina y Chile, 1840s-1920s) (Universidad Austral de Chile, 2019) examines the explosion o...

Alistair Sponsel, "Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that woul...

Nicholas Buccola, "The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas Buccola’s new book, The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton University Press, 2019), uses the iconic debate between Baldw...

Nancy S. Steinhardt, "Chinese Architecture: A History" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If there’s one thing that conjures up the – rightly contested – idea of a ‘civilisation’, it is grand palatial or religious buildings, and many such structures are foremost in how China is imagined...

Tom Wheeler, "From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future" (Brookings, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It's easy to get sidetracked while writing a book. But imagine being interrupted by the President of the United States. That happened to Tom Wheeler, who was in the midst of writing a history of co...

David C. Posthumus, “All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual” (U Nebraska Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), David C. Posthumus, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at the U...

Janet E. Croon, “The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865” (Savas Beatie, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sit alongside a disabled teenage Southerner as he records his experience in The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865 (Savas Beatie, 2018). This unique docume...

Seth Barrett Tillman on the Foreign Emoluments Clause and President Trump from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Seth Barrett Tillman, an instructor in the Department of Law at Maynooth University in Ireland, is one of the few scholars to have researched and written about the history of the Foreign Emoluments...

Should the U.S. Have Entered World War One? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the inaugural podcast of Arguing History, historians Michael S. Neiberg and Brian Neumann address the question of Americas decision in 1917 to declare war against Germany. Together they discuss ...

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, “Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment” (U. of Minnesota Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the preeminent theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault experience and observe the Iranian revolution? How did he find the revolution disruptive of a teleological notion of history? And how...

Guntis Smidchens, “The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution” (University of Washington Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the late 1980s, the Baltic Soviet Social Republics seemed to explode into song as Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian national movements challenged Soviet rule. The leaders of each of these movemen...

Paulina Bren, “The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring” (Cornell UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Major Zeman’s life is filled with action packed adventures. A young man finds his calling turning a collective farm into a shining example of agricultural efficiency.  Anna embraces her role as a s...

Karrin Hanshew, “Terror and Democracy in West Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In West Germany in September and October of 1977, a group of self-described urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction (RAF) kidnapped industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. In exchange for Schleyer, t...

Pieter Judson, “Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria” (Harvard UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if much of what we think we know about nationalism and the spread of the national identity over the course of the nineteenth century were wrong? This view is so widely accepted and ingrained 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 “...

Jovana Babovi?, "Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jovana Babovi?’s Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia (University of Pittsburgh Press) examines the ways in which middle-class Belgraders negotiated metropolitan modernit...

Romeo Guzman et al., "East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Romeo Guzman's and his colleague's East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte (Rutgers University Press, 2020) is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a Californ...

Slavery in World History from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Notwithstanding the fact that slavery is almost as old if not older than human civilization itself, involving almost every country and continent on the face of the planet, the vast majority of scho...

Kathleen M. McIntyre, "Protestantism and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca" (U New Mexico Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Kathleen M. McIntyre’s Protestantism and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca (University of New Mexico Press, 2019) explores the impact of Protestantism on Catholic indigenous communiti...

Catherine Keyser, "Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and ra...

Brooke Newman, "A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In an empire built on racial slavery, what roles do blood purity and citizenship play in the creation of subject citizens? This is one of the many questions broached by Dr. Brooke Newman in her new...

Stefan M. Wheelock, “Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic” (U Virginia Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic (University of Virginia Press, 2015), Dr. Stefan M. Wheelock analyses a little-discussed e...

Ann K. Ferrell, “Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century” (U Press of Kentucky, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ann K. Ferrell is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Folk Studies program at Western Kentucky University, and also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of American Folklore. Her first book, B...

Franz Rickaby, et al., “Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era” (U Wisconsin Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gretchen Dykstra‘s career to date has been both impressive and wide-ranging. She was the founding President of the Times Square Alliance, the former Commissioner of the NYC Department of Consumer A...

Danny Goldberg, “In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea” (Akashic Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea (Akashic Books, 2017), Danny Goldberg explores the political, social, and cultural influences of 1967–a pivotal year in Americ...

Susan Greenbaum, “Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty” (Rutgers UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Patrick Moynihan’s Report on the Negro Family was a seminal document in Great Society-era racial politics and public policy. Join us as we talk with Susan Greenbaum about her new book, Blaming the ...

Michael Kimmel, “Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era” (Nation Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Kimmel is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University. He is also executive director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities. His book...

Kathleen A. Feeley and Jennifer Frost, “When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in American History” (Palgrave McMillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Across a series of twelve essays, When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in American History (Palgrave McMillan, 2014)examines the important and understudied role gossip has played in American histo...

Lindsay Krasnoff, “The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010” (Lexington Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1967, an official of the French basketball federation lamented the team’s poor finish at that year’s European Championships in Finland. The French team finished sixth in their group of eight, an...

Alexander Maxwell, “Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism” (Tauris Academic Studies, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On 1 January 1993 Slovakia became an independent nation. According to conventional Slovak nationalist history that event was the culmination of a roughly thousand year struggle. Alexander Maxwell a...

Sally G. McMillen, “Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement” (Oxford, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Think of this. From the origins of civilization roughly 5000 years ago to around 1900 AD, the condition of women did not fundamentally change. They weren’t “second class citizens.” Rather, they wer...

Behnaz A. Mirzai, "A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800-1929" (U Texas Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Behnaz A. Mirzai’s book A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800-1929 (University of Texas Press, 2017) contributes to the growing field of slavery in the Middle East is a growing field ...

Garrett Felber, "Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the post-war Black Freedom Movement. In his new book Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carcera...

Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, "Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy" (The New Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, Professors of History at California State University—Fresno, discuss their co-authored book, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confed...

Jamie L. Pietruska, "Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America" (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A fortune teller, cotton prophet, and a weather forecaster walk into a bar—probably a more common occurrence than you might think in the Gilded Age United States! Jamie Pietruska’s Looking Forward:...

Katie Batza, "Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s looms large in recent histories of sexuality, medicine, and politics, and justly so—an unknown virus without a cure ravages an already persecuted minority, medical prof...

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 (...

Susan Carruthers, “The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016), Dr. Susan Carruthers, professor of American Studies at the University of Warwick, ...

Douglas L. Winiarski, “Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth Century New England” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Douglas L. Winiarski is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond and winner of the 2018 Bancroft Prize in American history for his book Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Ex...

Liam Cole Young, “List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed” (Amsterdam UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The list is the origin of culture. At least, that’s according to Umberto Eco, whose words open Liam Cole Young‘s new book, List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed (Amster...

Jeanine Michna-Bales, “Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When the Sun comes back And the first quail calls Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd. For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom If you follow the Drinkin’ Gourd. -“Follow the Drinkin’ Go...

LaShawn Harris, “Sex Workers, Psychics and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy” (U. of Illinois Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

LaShawn Harris is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. Sex Workers, Psychics and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, (University of Illino...

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...

J. Douglas Smith, “On Democracy’s Doorstep” (Hill and Wang, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, a legal revolution with far-reaching cultural, political, and economic import. But as J. Douglas Smith argues in On Democra...

Ian Jared Miller, “The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A new understanding of animals was central to how Japanese people redefined their place in the natural world in the nineteenth century. In The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tok...

Allen Fromherz, “Qatar: A Modern History” (Georgetown UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Qatar: A Modern History (Georgetown University Press, 2012), Dr. Allen Fromherz, a professor at Georgia State University, analyzes the cultural and political forces that have shaped...

Steve Gillon, “The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After” (Basic Books, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You could fill a large library with books about JFK’s assassination. We’ve even touched on the subject here. The topic of the transfer of power from JFK to LBJ, however, has been neglected. I was u...

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...

Elisheva A. Perelman, "American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan" (Hong Kong UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elisheva A. Perelman's new book American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) examines the consequences of Japan’s decision not to tackle the tuberculosis...

Rupert Lewis, "Marcus Garvey" (UP of West Indies, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rupert Lewis has written a biography of Marcus Garvey published by the University Press of the West Indies in 2018. His book Marcus Garvey documents the forging of Garvey’s remarkable vision of pan...

Dan Jones, "Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands" (Viking, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much has been written about the Crusades, the religiously-inspired wars that pockmarked the later centuries of the Middle Ages. Yet for all of the many books on the subject there has been surprisin...

Hannah Weiss Muller, "Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is no denying that the public remains fascinated with monarchy. In the United Kingdom, the royal family commands the headlines, but paradoxically they are distant and knowable all at once. Th...

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...

Bradley W. Hart, “Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018), Bradley W. Hart, assistant professor at California State University, Fresno...

Jonathan W. Marshall, “Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps most well known today from the images of his “hysterical” female patients featured in Bourneville’s Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. ...

Tam T. T. Ngo, “The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam” (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Think of Christianity in Southeast Asia today and what might come to mind is the predominantly Catholic Philippines, or the work of the Baptist church among linguistic and cultural minorities in My...

Dalia Muller, “Cuban Emigres and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cuba and Mexico have a long history of exchange and interaction. Cubans traveled to Mexico to work, engage in politics from afar, or expand businesses. Dalia Antonia Muller‘s Cuban Emigres and Inde...

Douglas Rogers, “The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism” (Cornell UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ever since the accidental discovery of oil in Perm in 1929, the so-called “Second Baku” has been known to be an industrial hub as well as the home to a GULAG labor camp. In post-Soviet times, howev...

Julie M. Weise, “Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South Since 1910” (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Julie M. Weise‘s new book Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South Since 1910 (UNC Press, 2015) is the first book to comprehensively document Mexicans’ and Mexican Americans’ long history of m...

Joseph M. Gabriel, “Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry” (U Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Commercial interests are often understood as impinging upon the ethical norms of medicine. In his new book, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutic...

Matthew L. Basso, “Meet Joe Copper: Maculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the United States, World War II is now called “The Good War,” as opposed to bad ones, I suppose, like Vietnam. Moreover, the Americans who fought in World War II are now called “The Greatest Gen...

Donna Landry, “Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture” (John Hopkins UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is a book about horses. Donna Landry‘s Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (The John Hopkins University Press, 2009) is all about how horses were a means of cultural e...

Jennifer Burns, “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right” (Oxford UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I was in high school I had several friends who went to Wichita’s only prep school. They were nice guys, played D&D, andsaid they were “Libertarians.”I thought that “Libertarian” might have som...

Harriet Evans, "Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between the early 1950s and the accelerated demolition and construction of Beijing's “old city” in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the residents of Dashalar—one of the capital city's poorest nei...

Nandini Patwardhan, "Radical Spirits: India’s First Woman Doctor and Her American Champions" (Story Artisan Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1883, a young woman named Anandi Joshi set out from her native India to the United States to study medicine. To do so, as Nandini Patwardhan describes in her book Radical Spirits: India’s First ...

Carol Zaleski, "The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings" (FSG, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393