Podcasts by New Books in Intellectual History

Stealing the Canon: Who Should Be In and Who Should Be Out? from 2023-01-24T09:00

Literary canons have come under fire for perpetuating privilege and exclusion. But some artists — including William Shakespeare and Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda — show us how canons can actually b...

Mirror Image: New Technologies and the Self from 2023-01-07T09:00

16th-century glass mirrors and 21st-century camera phones actually share a lot in common; they both are technologies that shaped new forms of the self. GuestsIan Mortimer, historian and author of M...

The Shape of History: Thinking Historically and Changing History from 2023-01-02T09:00

The way we think about history can affect our belief that we can change it. GuestsJo Guldi, Associate Professor at Southern Methodist University and author of The History Manifesto Amber Mornings...

The Shape of History: Thinking Historically and Changing History from 2023-01-02T09:00

The way we think about history can affect our belief that we can change it. GuestsJo Guldi, Associate Professor at Southern Methodist University and author of The History Manifesto Amber Mornings...

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

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

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

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

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

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

On George Orwell's "1984" from 2022-11-28T09:00

In 1948, English author George Orwell wrote what would become one of the defining novels of the 20th century, 1984. He was writing in the years following WWII and the beginning of The Cold War. It ...

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

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

On Sigmund Freud's "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" from 2022-11-18T09:00

Sigmund Freud is probably best known as the founder of psychoanalysis. In his clinical practice, he established theories on how the human psyche develops and behaves, and his 1905 text Three Essays...

On Victor and Edith Turner's "The Forest of Symbols" from 2022-11-17T09:00

In the mid-20th century, British anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner studied the Ndembu people of present-day Zambia. They wrote about their findings in their 1967 book The Forest of Symbols. T...

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

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

On Aimé Césaire's "Discourse on Colonialism" from 2022-11-14T09:00

Aimé Césaire was born in 1913 on the island of Martinique, which was colonized by the French in the 1600s. He received a scholarship to complete his education in Paris, and by 1935, he’d fallen in ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Augustine's "Confessions" from 2022-10-31T08:00

What is freedom? If we are free, why do we feel anxiety? How do I relate to the world? Saint Augustine of Hippo asked himself these questions around 400 AD as he wrote Confessions—indeed, as he liv...

On Samuel Smiles' "Self-Help" from 2022-10-26T08:00

Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help isn’t just an advice manual. It represents the invention of a genre, and not a moment too soon. Smiles was writing at a time when work conditions were extremely poor, and p...

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

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

On Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" from 2022-10-19T08:00

In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, an investigation into the nature of wealth. Smith is now considered the Father of Capitalism or the Father of Modern Economics. In fact, many pe...

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

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

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

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

On Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" from 2022-10-14T08:00

Joseph Conrad, who published 20 books and several best-sellers by the time of his death, was also a sailor. Heart of Darkness follows seaman Charles Marlow’s journey down a river in Africa. It is C...

On Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" from 2022-10-13T08:00

In 1651, the English Civil Wars were ending, and Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan. He used the book to advocate his ideal government: an absolute, monarchical sovereign. He also highlighted the pr...

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

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

On Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" from 2022-10-11T08:00

In 1951, following the Holocaust and Second World War, Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s aim was in part to document and reflect on the atrocities that had occurred. But ...

On David Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature" from 2022-09-30T08:00

In 1739, Scottish philosopher David Hume set out to chart the nature and limits of human knowledge. He published his theories and findings in what would become one of philosophy’s most influential ...

On Einstein's Discoveries from 2022-09-29T08:00

Before Albert Einstein, our understanding of space, time, and gravity hadn’t really shifted from the theories that Sir Isaac Newton developed in the 1700s. But in 1905, Einstein published his theor...

On Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" from 2022-09-28T08:00

Charles Dawin’s 1859 book The Origin of Species introduced his famous theory of evolution. Darwin developed his theories of life and evolution after a historic voyage circumnavigating the globe on ...

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

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

On Plato's "Apology" from 2022-09-19T08:00

In 399 BC, the Greek philosopher Socrates was on trial. He believed in free-thought and sought truth by questioning everything, including society. And the Athenian government decided he was dangero...

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

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

On Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" from 2022-09-14T08:00

Victor Frankl was a leader in 20th century psychiatry. In 1942, Frankl was sent to a concentration camp in the Czech Republic. Frankl was already influential in the field of psychiatry by the time ...

On Plato's "The Republic" from 2022-09-12T08:00

Imagine you could start from scratch and create the ideal city. How would you design it? Who would be in charge? This thought experiment was explored almost 2,400 years ago in the Republic, a text ...

On Maciej Miechowita's "Treatise on the Two Sarmatias" from 2022-09-09T08:00

In Treatise on the Two Sarmatias, Polish scholar Maciej Miechowita argued that two mountain ranges that were described on maps dating back to antiquity did not, in fact, exist. This was the 1500s, ...

On Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" from 2022-09-08T08:00

In 1962, American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn was struck by Aristotle’s beliefs about motion. Actually, he thought that those theories...

On Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" from 2022-09-07T08:00

Scottish philosopher David Hume thought that rationalism didn’t work at all. German philosopher Immanuel Kant thought rationalism didn’t work by itself. Critique of Pure Reason, the first in a thre...

On Sigmund Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents" from 2022-09-06T08:00

In 1930, Sigmund Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents and laid out his theory of civilization: civilization’s a problem, and it makes us unhappy. Freud felt humans were aggressive creatures...

On John Maynard Keynes’ "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" from 2022-09-05T08:00

John Keynes’ book, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was published in England at the tail end of the Great Depression. This text is responsible for a massive shift in economic theor...

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

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

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

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

On Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" from 2022-08-26T08:00

Edmund Burke was a British government official who saw the French Revolution as a mob action. He wrote a book called Reflections on the Revolution in France. It was published in 1790—one year after...

On Inazō Nitobe's "Bushido: The Soul of Japan" from 2022-08-25T08:00

Nitobe Inazō wanted to explain Japan to Westerners, particularly morality as it is taught in Japanese society. He was born a Samurai in 1862. In his book Bushido: The Soul of Japan, Inazō Nitobe ex...

On Soren Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling" from 2022-08-19T08:00

As a college student, Harvard professor Michelle Sanchez was torn between following her faith or following her heart. She found guidance in the 19th-century philosophical text Fear and Trembling, i...

On Soren Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling" from 2022-08-19T08:00

As a college student, Harvard professor Michelle Sanchez was torn between following her faith or following her heart. She found guidance in the 19th-century philosophical text Fear and Trembling, i...

Economics from 2022-06-16T08:00

Matt Seybold talks about the development of economics as a discourse inside and outside the academy, its success in making itself felt to be the only discourse that can talk about resource manageme...

Modernization from 2022-06-08T08:00

Varsha Venkatasubramanian discusses the many trajectories of modernization as a theoretical concept. She focuses mainly on the history of development in the US and in India, through the cold war ye...

Military Industrial Complex from 2022-05-20T08:00

Kim talks to Patrick Deer about the Military Industrial Complex, a term used by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a 1961 speech to describe a permanent war economy, and the political, economic, ...

Alienation from 2022-05-18T08:00

In this episode Kim talks with Mustafa Yavas about Alienation. Mustafa quotes Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. He also references Albert Camus’ books The Stranger and The...

Heterotopia from 2022-05-13T08:00

Kim speaks with Amanda Caleb about Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. Amanda says that the classic definition of “heterotopia” is found in Foucault’s article “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and He...

Simon Critchley, "Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts" (Yale UP, 2021) from 2022-02-03T09:00

Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts (Yale UP, 2021) brings together thirty-five essays, originally published in the Times, on a wide range of topics, from the dimensions of Plato’s academy and the my...

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...

William Poole, "Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost" (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is widely recognised as the greatest epic poem in the English language – and it is buried in the commentary of thousands of other texts. William Poole, who is Joh...

Cemil Aydin, “The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Almost daily in popular media the Muslim World is pinpointed as a homogeneous entity that stands separate and parallel to the similarly imagined West. But even scratching the surface of the idea of...

Philip A. Craig, "The Bond of Grace and Duty in the Soteriology of John Owen" (Founders Press, 2020)  from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Philip A. Craig’s new book on John Owen, the premier puritan theologian, demonstrates how carefully his subject tracked the influence of antinomianism in his writing. Craig’s book roots Owen’s idea...

Joan Watts, "The Collected Letters of Alan Watts" (New World Library, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alan Watts (1915-1973) was one of the first to interpret Eastern wisdom for a Western audience. Joan Watts, Alan's eldest daughter, is the co-editor (along with her sister, Anne) of the new volume,...

J. C. McKeown, “A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The back cover of J. C. McKeown‘s new book, A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2017), is adorned not with review quotes from contemporary scholars, but rather the di...

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 ...

Peter J. Williams, "Can We Trust the Gospels?" (Crossway, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is there evidence to believe the Gospels? The Gospels?Matthew, Mark, Luke, John?are four accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings while on earth. But should we accept them as historically accurate? W...

Matthew J. Walton, “Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Burmese Buddhist monks have featured in the news quite a lot in recent times, not as peaceful practitioners of self-abnegation, but at activists at the forefront of political movements characterize...

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...

Eric T. Kasper and Quentin D. Vieregge, "The United States Constitution in Film: Part of Our National Culture" (Lexington Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The U.S. Constitution is often depicted in popular films, teaching lessons about what this founding document means and what it requires. The United States Constitution in Film: Part of Our National...

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

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

Kabria Baumgartner, "In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (NYU Press, 2019) is an intellectual and cultural history of the educational activism of African American women a...

Jeffrey S. McDonald, "John Gerstner and the Renewal of Presbyterian and Reformed Evangelicalism in Modern America" (Pickwick, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most important trends within evangelicalism over the last half-century has been a renewal of Reformed theology. In this important new book, Jeffrey S. McDonald, who is a Presbyterian pas...

William Kolbrener, “The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition” (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition (Indiana University Press, 2016), William Kolbrener, professor of English at Bar Ilan University in Israel, explores the life and thoug...

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...

Anne Watts, "The Collected Letters of Alan Watts" (New World Library, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anne Watts is one of the co-editors of the new book, The Collected letters of Alan Watts, released in January 2018 from New World Library. Anne Watts is a facilitator and educator who is committed ...

Grace Davie, “Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855-2005” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Apartheid in South Africa formally ended in 1994, but the issue of poverty and what to do about it remained as contentious as it had been a century earlier. In the new book, Poverty Knowledge in So...

Sherrow O. Pinder et al., "Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a nuanced and long-needed anthology interrogates the “never ending issue” of the unequal positioning ...

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, "In Dialogue with Classical Indian Traditions: Encounter, Transformation and Interpretation" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why does the narrative motif of ‘dialogue’ pervade Hindu texts?  What role does it serve?  Join me as I speak with Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Fellow of the British Academy, and distinguished professo...

Susanna L. Blumenthal, “Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susanna L. Blumenthal is a professor of law and associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. Her book, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal ...

Zena Hitz, "Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Do you have an active intellectual life? That is a question you may feel uncomfortable answering these days given that the very phrase “intellectual life” can strike some people as pretentious or s...

Pu Wang, "The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture" (Harvard Asia Center, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With questions over how ideas are translated across borders and between languages as acute as ever today, it is sometimes easy to forget that our efforts to understand each other are mediated throu...

Mark P. Bradley, “The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his farewell address, President George Washington warned his fellow citizens of the dangers of what has come to be known in American political speech as “foreign entanglements.” Whether Washingt...

Lara Harb, "Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and...

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...

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

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

Edgar Garcia,  "Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs and Khipu" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his sixth thesis on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin wrote, “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of t...

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...

Benjamin Fondane, “Existential Monday” (NYRB Classics, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benjamin Fondane, a Franco-Romanian writer and contributor to the development of existential philosophy in the 1930s and 40s, is in the process of being rediscovered. His work has gained a new rele...

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...

Paul K.-K. Cho, "Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern myths? Combining theories of metaphor and narrative, Paul Cho argues that the Hebrew Bible is more deeply mythological tha...

Scott A. Mitchell, “Buddhism in America: Global Religion, Local Contexts” (Bloomsbury, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scott A. Mitchell‘s recent monograph, Buddhism in America: Global Religion, Local Contexts (Bloomsbury, 2016), provides a much-needed up-to-date overview of Buddhism in the United States. To tackle...

Robert Pippin, "Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Pippin's book Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form (University of Chicago Press, 2020) is a work in the philosophy of film published in 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. Each cha...

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...

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

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

Fadi A. Bardawil, "Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx famously claimed that philosophers had previously only attempted to interpret the world; the point, however, was to change it. In the 20th century, no philosopher h...

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...

Sarah Hammerschlag, “Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Hammerschlag, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University o...

Matthew Duncombe, "Ancient Relativity: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics and Skeptics" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a matter of basic metaphysics, we classify individuals in terms of their relations to other things – for example, a parent is a parent of someone, a larger object is larger than a smaller object...

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

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

Daniel Immerwahr, “Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Modernization dominates development’s historiography. Historians characterize moments in development’s history–from the Tennessee Valley Authority to US-led “nation-building”in the Third World–as h...

Miriam Kalman Friedman, "Rivers of Light: The Life of Claire Myers Owens" (Syracuse UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Growing up in a conservative, middle-class family in Texas, Claire Myers Owens sought adventure and freedom at an early age. At twenty years old, she left home and quickly found a community of like...

A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 1: Man into Wolf from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, we discuss how I discovered Robert Eisler’s Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy and unpack the book’s argument that modern humans...

Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr., "Reading Politics with Machiavelli" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr., in his new book, Reading Politics with Machiavelli(Oxford University Press, 2018), puts himself and the reader into conversation with Machiavelli, exploring Machiavelli’s th...

Richard Weikart, “Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich” (Regnery History, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Trying to figure out what Hitler “really” thought about anything is difficult because he was–among many other things–a clever, opportunistic politician and a very prolix one at that. Over the cours...

Marta V. Vicente, "Debating Sex and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Spain" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s interview on New Books in History is with Dr. Marta Vicente, Professor of History at the University of Kansas to talk about her 2017 Cambridge University Press release, Debating Sex and Gen...

Neil Roberts on How Ideas Become Books in Africana and AfroAm Studies from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Where do good ideas come from? How does an idea go from creation to a research project? How is historical research done? And how does research find its way into a finished book? And what impact can...

Emma Hunter, "Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Histories of African nationalism and decolonization have often assumed that political ideas such as freedom and democracy were imported into African colonies and helped motivate Africans to seek th...

Molly Worthen, “Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beginning with a network of reformed figures that orbited around Billy Graham, from J. Howard Pew’s money to Carl Henry’s passion for cultural esteem, Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis...

J. A. Ball and T. Burroughs, "A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X" (Black Classic Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is part of our Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. In this series, we delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting...

Taylor Petrey, "Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Taylor Petrey is an Associate Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College and the Editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. His latest book is Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Mod...

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

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

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

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

Anne Garland Mahler, "From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Duke UP, 2018), Anne Garland Mahler traces the history and intellectual legacy of the understudied gl...

Begüm Adalet, "Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the opening decades of the Cold War, US policymakers and academics used modernization theory to provide an alternative model to communism for improving living standards. As Begüm Adalet demo...

Nathan McGovern, "The Snake and The Mongoose: The Emergence of Identity in Early Indian Religion" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of Indian religions in the centuries leading up to the common era has been characterized in the scholarship by two distinct overarching traditions: the Brahmans (associated with Vedic t...

Li Zhi, “A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, and Haun Saussy have created a wonderful resource for readers, researchers, students, and teachers alike. A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Wr...

Paul Goldin, "The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Goldin's book The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them (Princeton UP, 2020) provides an unmatched introduction to eight of the most important works of classica...

Joshua Bennett, "Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man" (Harvard UP, 2020)  from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020)...

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

Many have read and debated “How Political Science became Irrelevant” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author of that piece is Michael C. Desch and much it comes from his recent book Cult o...

Daniel Magaziner, “The Art of Life in South Africa” (Ohio University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Magaziner’s latest book, The Art of Life in South Africa (Ohio University Press, 2016, and UKZN Press, 2017), is a welcome addition to the intellectual history of South Africa. Rich in color...

Stuart Elden, "Shakespearean Territories" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can Shakespeare tell us about territory, and what can territory tell us about Shakespeare?  In Shakespearean Territories (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Stuart Elden, Professor of Politic...

Pablo Meninato, "Unexpected Affinities: The History of Type in Architectural Project from Laugier to Duchamp" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While the concept of "type" has been present in architectural discourse since its formal introduction at the end of the eighteenth century, its role in the development of architectural projects has...

Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...

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

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

Michael E. Sawyer, "Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X" (Pluto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This episode is part of a Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. In this series, we delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, corr...

Arlie Loughnan, "Self, Others and the State: Relations of Criminal Responsibility" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Criminal responsibility is a key-organizing concept of the criminal law, but Arlie Loughnan argues that it needs re-examination. Focusing on the Australian experience, Self, Others and the State: R...

Gregory Dawes, "Galileo and the Conflict between Religion and Science" (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Open conflict between religion and science may not be inevitable, but a germ of discord resides in some of the fundamental commitments of both; in this sense, war is always, potentially, just aroun...

Ferenc Laczo, “Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History, 1929-1948” (Brill, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For non-specialists, the Holocaust in Hungary is a history both familiar and murky. Many Americans have read memoirs like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Judith Magyar Isaacson’s Seeds of Sarah in high sch...

Christopher M. Kelty, "The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Participation is everywhere today. It has been formalized, measured, standardized, scaled up, network-enabled, and sent around the world. Platforms, algorithms, and software offer to make participa...

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

Kellie Carter Jackson, "Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence" (U Penn Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What the United States dubs “freedom” is inherently tied to methods of violence. The United States’s abolitionist movement was not free from this connection. This is in spite of one of the best kno...

David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, “The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Surveillance and literature, as kindred practices, have light to shed on each other.” When David Rosen and Aaron Santesso considered the discipline of surveillance studies in the wake of the atta...

Geoffrey C. Goble, "Chinese Esoteric Buddhism: Amoghavajra, the Ruling Elite, and the Emergence of a Tradition" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his recent book, Chinese Esoteric Buddhism: Amoghavajra, the Ruling Elite, and the Emergence of a Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2019), Geoffrey Goble examines the emergence and early his...

James Bernard Murphy, "How to Think Politically" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is truly at stake in politics? Nothing less than how we should live, as individuals and as communities. This book goes beyond the surface headlines, the fake news and the hysteria to explore t...

Andrew Sobanet, "Generation Stalin:  French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his 1924 biography of Mahatma Gandhi, writer Romain Rolland embraced the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence and decried the “dictators of Moscow” and the “idolatrous ideology of the Revolution....

Richard Crockatt, “Einstein and Twentieth-Century Politics: A Salutary Moral Influence,” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Crockatt is an Emeritus Professor in the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. His book, Einstein & Twentieth-Century Politics: ‘A Salutary Moral Influence‘ (Oxford U...

Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, ...

Santiago Zabala, "Being at Large: Freedom in the Ago of Alternative Facts" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent years, questions around the nature of ?truth ?and ?facts have reentered public debate, often in discussions around journalistic bias, and whether politically neutral reporting is possible...

Prakash Shah, "Western Foundations of the Caste System" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Indian caste system is an ancient, pervasive institution of social organization within the subcontinent – or is it? Join me as I speak with Dr. Prakash Shah (Reader in Culture and Law at the Qu...

Matthew L. Jones, “Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew L. Jones’s wonderful new book traces a history of failed efforts to make calculating machines, from Blaise Pascal’s work in the 1640s through the efforts of Charles Babbage in the nineteent...

Trevor Pearce, "Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Trevor Pearce demonstrates that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an eno...

Nancy J. Chodorow, "The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye" (Routledge 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition (Routledge 2020) Professor Nancy J. Chodorow gives name and shape to an American middle group between th...

Richard Drake, "Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the first half of the 20th century the American historian Charles Austin Beard enjoyed both professional success and a national prominence that suffered with his outspoken opposition to the ...

Scott Selisker, “Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Scott Selisker offers readers a fascinating new history of American anxieties along the...

Ayon Maharaj, "The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ayon Maharaj's The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta (Bloomsbury, 2020) brings together a distinguished team of scholars from philosophy, theology, and religious studies to provide the first ...

Derek Penslar, "Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The life of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an arti...

David Colander and Craig Freedman, "Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago's Abandonment of Classical Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you are reading this, you have probably run into the "Chicago" model at some point or another, in terms of public policy, orthodox modern finance, macro or micro economics, or any other arena wh...

Gail Ashton, ed. “Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015/2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dilapidated thirteenth-century walls as a playscape for today’s children, medieval relics made as fetish objects for twenty-first century enthusiasts, tourism at “the birthplace of King Arthur,” Ha...

Konstantina Zanou, "Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Konstantina Zanou is an Assistant Professor of Italian and Mediterranean Studies at Columbia University. Her captivating book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering th...

Kathleen Gallagher Elkins, "Mary, Mother of Martyrs" (FSR, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Throughout Christian history, the Virgin Mary has been idealized as a self-sacrificing mother and a model for all Christian women to emulate. However, she is one of many ancient maternal figures wh...

Whitney G. Gamble, "Christ and the Law: Antinomianism at the Westminster Assembly" (Reformation Heritage Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Westminster Assembly (1643-53) was one of the most important ecclesiastical councils in the history of Reformed Protestantism, but until very recently it had received little in the way of schol...

Michael Brown, “The Irish Enlightenment” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Traditionally histories of the Enlightenment era exclude Ireland in the belief that the movement left little impression on developments. In The Irish Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2016),...

Tony Bolden, "Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk" (UP of Mississippi, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) by Tony Bolden, an Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas, and a...

Nancy Mattina, "Uncommon Anthropologist: Gladys Reichard and Western Native American Culture" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Protégé of Elsie Clews Parsons and Franz Boas, founder and head of Barnard College's anthropology department, and a trailblazer in Native American linguistics and anthropology, Gladys Reichard (189...

Darren Barany, "The New Welfare Consensus: Ideological, Political and Social Origins" (SUNY Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 1996 repeal of Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- the New Deal-era relief program for poor women with children -- was a seminal moment in the modern history of the US welfare state. Tha...

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...

Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most creative and successful challengers in thi...

Karl-Stéphan Bouthillette, "Dialogue and Doxography in Indian Philosophy" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This ground-breaking work on Indian philosophical doxography examines the function of dialectical texts within their intellectual and religious milieu. In Dialogue and Doxography in Indian Philosop...

Susan Carlile, "Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind" (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though not as well known today as some of her literary contemporaries, Charlotte Lennox wrote numerous works during the mid-18th century that won her critical acclaim and influenced subsequent gene...

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...

Justin Gifford, "Revolution Or Death: The Life of Eldridge Cleaver" (Lawrence Hill, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Revolution Or Death: The Life of Eldridge Cleaver (Lawrence Hill Books, 2020) is a remarkable biography that examines the notorious Black revolutionary meticulously within the context of his changi...

Ana Stevenson, "The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Ana Stevenson explores the ubiquity of what she terms the “woman-slave analogy” in nineteenth-centu...

Joyce Antler, "Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement" (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joyce Antler is the Samuel J. Lane Professor Emerita of American Jewish history and culture at Brandeis University. Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York Un...

William H. Shaw, “Utilitarianism and the Ethics of War” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On any mature view, war is horrific. Naturally, there is a broad range of fundamental ethical questions regarding war. According to most moral theories, war is nonetheless sometimes permitted, and ...

Erica Fretwell, "Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We so often take our senses as natural, but perhaps we should understand them as historically situated. Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke University Press...

Richard McBride II, "Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of ?ich’?n" (U Hawaii Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Richard McBride II about Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of ?ich’?n (University of Hawaii Press, 2016). The book is a comprehensive study of...

Michael Ruse, "The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and Their Battle to Understand Human Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What accounts for the antagonism between Christianity and Darwinism? For Michael Ruse, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University, the answer is simple: Darwin...

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...

Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, "Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Philippine Revolution of 1896-1905, which began against Spain and continued against the United States, took place in the context of imperial subjugation and local resistance across Southeast As...

Matthew McManus, "The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 shocked and surprised a number of commentators, especially because his own attitudes seemed to be in conflict with much of what people often associate with cons...

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

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

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...

O. Carter Snead, "What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At first glance, the term “expressive individualism” seems benign enough. After all, people throughout the Western world value their personal freedom and the liberty to make crucial life decisions ...

Abram Van Engen, "City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abram Van Engen is an Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. Van Engen’s research examines early American literature, the history of emotions, Puritanism, collective ...

Matthew Bowman, "Christian: The Politics of a Word in America" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The intersection of religion and politics in the United States is one of the nation's most enduring conversations. Christian: The Politics of a Word in America(Harvard University Press, 2018) by Dr...

A. John Simmons, “Boundaries of Authority” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Political states claim the moral right to rule the persons living within their jurisdiction; they claim the authority to make and enforce laws, establish policies, and allocate benefits and burdens...

Ian H. Clary, "Reformed Evangelicalism and the Search for a Usable Past: The Historiography of Arnold Dallimore" (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ian H. Clary, who teaches historical theology at Colorado Christian University, has written Reformed Evangelicalism and the Search for a Usable Past: The Historiography of Arnold Dallimore, Pastor-...

Matthew Miller, "The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge" (Northwestern UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge (Northwestern University Press, 2018), Matthew Miller explores the literary evolution of the modern e...

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

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

Andrew Cole, “The Birth of Theory” (U. of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Was Hegel a medieval thinker? In The Birth of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Andrew Cole puts forward a reexamination of Hegelian dialectics that embeds Hegel in a long tradition of m...

Brian Black, "In Dialogue with the Mah?bh?rata" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This book offers the first extensive study of the dialogue form in the Mah?bh?rata. Despite its importance, the variety of uses and implications of dialogue in the Mah?bh?rata remain relatively une...

Alexander Zevin, "Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Economist is a curious publication. It always takes a point of view (as opposed to the all-the-news-that’s-fit-to-print approach). It maintains a uniform voice (editors and writers are typicall...

Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of ...

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

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

Lia Paradis, "Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire" (I. B. Tauris, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Empty House, Sherlock Holmes makes a dramatic reappearance in the surgery of his friend Dr Watson. Presumed dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes recounts his travels in the Ea...

Dominik Finkelde, "Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan and the Foundations of Ethics" (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are we to conceive of acts that suddenly expose the injustice of the current order? This is a question that has puzzled philosophers for centuries, and it’s the question that animates Dominik F...

Matthew Bingham, "Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew Bingham, who teaches theology and church history at Oak Hill College, London, has written what must be one of the most startling accounts of religion in mid-seventeenth-century England. His...

Caroline Winterer, “American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Caroline Winterer is the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale University Press, 2016) g...

E. Chemerinsky and H. Gillman, "The Religion Clauses: The Case for Separating Church and State" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Throughout American history, views on the proper relationship between the state and religion have been deeply divided. And, with recent changes in the composition of the Supreme Court, First Amendm...

Lucia Rubinelli, "Constituent Power: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

"The intellectual historian has to start with the words." – Richard Whatmore, What is Intellectual History? When political theorists write about the principle of popular power, that is, who are the...

Alexandre Kojève, "Atheism," trans by Jeff Love (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Columbia University press has just released a new translation of a work by philosopher Alexandre Kojève, simply titled Atheism, translated by Professor Jeff Love. Considered to be one of the twenti...

Arie L. Molendijk, “Friedrich Max Muller and the Sacred Books of the East” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Arie L. Molendijk is Professor of the History of Christianity and Philosophy in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has written Friedri...

Caroline H. Yang, "The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form (Stanford University Press, 2020) explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US l...

James Shapiro, "Shakespeare in a Divided America" (Penguin, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (Penguin, 2020) renowned Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro turns his attention to the reception of Shakespeare ...

Matthew C. Godfrey, ed., "The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 7" (Church Historians Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph Smith, the nineteenth-century American prophet who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, can, at times, be considered an elusive historical figure. There were many forces ...

J.D. Trout, “Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The social practice we call science has had spectacular success in explaining the natural world since the 17th century. While advanced mathematics and other precursors of modern science were not un...

Mark Somos, "American States of Nature: The Origins of Independence, 1761-1775" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Federalist no. 2, John Jay considered the ‘wide spreading country’ of the American republic. It was, he argued, as if the land itself was fashioned by the hand of Providence, which ‘in a particu...

Peter Adamson, "Classical Indian Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Classical Indian Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2020), Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri survey both the breadth and depth of Indian philosophical traditions. Their odyssey touches on the ...

Ethan Mills, "Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nagarjuna, Jayarasi, and Sri Harsa" (Lexington Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Skepticism has a long history in the Western tradition, from Pyrrhonian Skepticism in the Hellenistic period to more contemporary forms of skepticism most often used as foils to theories of knowled...

Thomas Aiello, “The Battle for the Souls of Black Folk: W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, and the Debate that Shaped the Course of Civil Rights” (ABC-CLIO, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Aiello is associate professor of history and African American studies at Valdosta State University. In The Battle for the Souls of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and the D...

Glenn Sauer, "Points of Contact: Science, Religion, and the Search for Truth" (Orbis Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a scientist and practicing Catholic, Dr. Sauer brings a unique perspective to several of the important issues related to finding a space for dialogue between the at times opposing fields of scie...

Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

Adriaan C. Neele, "Before Jonathan Edwards: Sources of New England Theology" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Edwards is by now widely recognised as America’s most important early philosopher and theologian. Much of the scholarship that exegetes his work is content to see it as something innovativ...

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

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

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...

Great Books: Melissa Schwartzberg on Rousseau's "The Social Contract" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The opening sentence of 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Roussau's The Social Contract poses a central question for all of us. Why do we liv...

Gil Ben-Herut, "?iva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Raga?ega?u (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Studies of Hindu saints tend to focus primarily on the saints themselves—their words, teachings, and practices—rather than tending to the often complex and complicated world of texts and traditions...

Mark R. Andryczyk, “The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian History” (U. of Toronto Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012), Mark R. Andryczyk takes his readers to an intriguing territory of dense narratives, arising from a comple...

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 ...

Mark Sedgwick, "Key Thinkers of the Radical Right" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The resurgence of the radical Right in America and Europe has drawn attention to the existence of political philosophers and writers whose names are only sometimes familiar and whose thought is gen...

Samuel Hayim Brody, "Martin Buber's Theopolitics" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Martin Buber is known as one of the 20th century's greatest Jewish scholars and thinkers, but he is less well known for his political theory and activism. In Martin Buber's Theopolitics (Indiana Un...

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

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

Adam H. Domby, "The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory" (U Virginia Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adam H. Domby, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Charleston, has written a rigorous analysis of American political memory as it connects to the Civil War and long shadow of the...

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

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

Fleming Rutledge, “The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ” (Eerdmans, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this program, I talk with Fleming Rutledge about her new book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2015), and the themes and motifs surrounding the topic in the h...

David Kettler and Thomas Wheatland, "Learning From Franz L. Neumann" (Anthem Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Franz Neumann was a member of a generation that saw the end of the Kaiserreich and the beginnings of a democratic republic carried by the labor movement. In Neumann's case, this involved a practica...

Adrienne Mayor, "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by the MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 year...

Alfred S. Posamentier and Robert Geretschlager, “The Circle: A Mathematical Exploration Beyond the Line” (Prometheus Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alfred S. Posamentier and Robert Geretschlager, The Circle: A Mathematical Exploration Beyond the Line (Prometheus Books, 2016) goes considerably beyond what its modest title would suggest. The cir...

Great Books: Maureen McLane on Wordsworth's Poetry from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The British romantic poet William Wordsworth is best known for his moving evocations of nature, his celebration of childhood, and his quest to find a shared humanity in his poetry. He’s also widely...

B.R. Ambedkar, "Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition" (Verso, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand (Verso, 2016) and with an Introduction ‘The Doctor and the Saint’ by Arundhati Roy, is based on a speech by Dr. B.R. Ambeda...

Matt Dawson “Social Theory for Alternative Societies” (Palgrave, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can social theory offer to visions of an alternative society? In his new book, Social Theory for Alternative Societies (Palgrave, 2016), Dr Matt Dawson, a Lecturer in Sociology at the Universi...

Thomas Piketty, "Capital and Ideology" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations - ...

Andrew R. Holmes, "The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism, 1830-1930" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Earlier today I caught up with my colleague at Queen’s University Belfast, Andrew R. Holmes, to discuss his outstanding new book, The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Exp...

Ibram X. Kendi, “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” (Nation Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ibram X. Kendi is an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books, 2016)...

Nicola Lacey, "In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions" (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her latest book, In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2016), Nicola Lacey brings together philosophical, historical and socio-legal ...

Elliott Sober, "The Design Argument" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story goes: you are walking in the woods and see a wrist-watch on the ground; you don’t know how it got there or why it has come to be abandoned here, but you can surmise that someone somewhere...

Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is the scientific value of objectivity in conflict with the social justice commitment to diversity? In her latest book, Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry (University of C...

Great Books: Nicholas Johnson on Samuel Beckett from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Another heavenly day” is the opening line of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days (1961), where Winnie sits buried to her waist in sand, with her husband Willie stuck a few feet away from her … but la...

Andrew R. Murphy, "William Penn: A Life" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While William Penn’s name is one familiar to many Americans thanks to his founding of the Pennsylvania colony, this accomplishment can overshadow both his role as a leading 17th-century English Qua...

Adam Rovner, “In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel” (New York UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel (New York University Press, 2014), Adam Rovner, Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver, ex...

Ashley D. Farmer, "New Perspectives of the Black Intellectual Tradition" (Northwestern UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The field of African American intellectual history is enjoying a kind of renaissance at the moment. The resurgence is due to the work of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) an...

Martha Nussbaum, “Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anger is among the most familiar phenomena in our moral lives. It is common to think that anger is an appropriate, and sometimes morally required, emotional response to wrongdoing and injustice. In...

Shadaab Rahemtullah, "Qur'an of the Oppressed: Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shadaab Rahemtullah's book Qur'an of the Oppressed: Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers a compelling comparative analysis of the works of four Mus...

Robin Marie Averbeck, "Liberalism is not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robin Marie Averbeck is a writer, activist and teacher at California State University, Chico. Liberalism is not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought (The University of North Caroli...

John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco, “Cuba, the United States, and the Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930-1975” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco’s new book, Cuba, the United States, and the Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930-1975 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), reaches across the Atlantic ocean and connect...

Great Books: Denis Hollier on Lévi-Strauss' "Tristes Tropiques" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Claude Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques is one of the great books of the 20th century: intellectually bold, morally capacious, and it aims to understand nothing less than the elemental workings of t...

Onur Ulas Ince, "Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Onur Ulas Ince constructs an important analysis of liberalism, capitalism, and empire in his new book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018). This text ...

Samantha Barbas, “Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America” (Stanford Law Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford Law Books, 2016), Samantha Barbas provides a history of Americans’ use of law to manage their public image. She approaches...

Paul Nahin, "Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons: From the Mathematics of Heat to the Development of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable (Princeton University Press, 2020), by Paul Nahin, is a book that is meant for s...

Nicholas J. Moore, "Repetition in Hebrews: Plurality and Singularity in the Letter to the Hebrews, Its Ancient Context, and the Early Church" (Mohr Siebeck, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is repetition always bad? The Letter to the Hebrews lies at the heart of a tradition that views repetition always negative. But is this the best understanding of Hebrews? Nicholas Moore says, ‘No.’...

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

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

Owen Whooley, "On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. Bu...

Omid Safi, “Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It's often touted that Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the United States. That may be the case but popular renderings of the writings of this 13th-century Muslim have largely detached him ...

Anders Ingram, “Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You read a lot about “Orientalism,” that is, the often odd ways in which Westerners tried to understand predominantly Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. You don’t read a lot about good Western sc...

Jon Piccini, "Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Australia" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After the Second World War, an Australian diplomat was one of eight people to draft the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. And in the years that followed, Australians of many different stripes—inclu...

Helena Rosenblatt, "The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How is it that “liberalism” is a word so ubiquitous and yet we can hardly seem to agree on its meaning? In her book The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Pr...

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

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

Ithamar Theodor, "The Bhagavad-G?t?: A Critical Introduction" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ithamar Theodor's The Bhagavad-G?t?: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2020) is a systematic and comprehensive introduction to one of the most read texts in South Asia. The Bhagavad-g?t? is at it...

Katharina Pistor, "The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

"Most lawyers, most actors, most soldiers and sailors, most athletes, most doctors, and most diplomats feel a certain solidarity in the face of outsiders, and, in spite of other differences, they s...

Alan Jacobs, "The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alan Jacobs is a renowned literary critic, with a talent for writing that books that speak to our current predicaments. A professor at Baylor University, his recent work includes a “biography” of t...

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

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

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...

Brian A. Hatcher, "Hinduism Before Reform" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Did modern Hinduism truly emerge due to the “reforms” instigated by “progressive” colonial figures such as Rammohun Roy? Brian A. Hatcher's new book Hinduism Before Reform (Harvard University Press...

Andrew S. Curran, "Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely" (Other Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Denis Diderot has long been regarded as one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, thanks to his editorship of the influential multi-volume Encyclopédie. As Andrew S. Curran explains i...

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

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

Marco Ferrante, "Indian Perspectives on Consciousness, Language and Self" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many Indian philosophers, language is inextricably tied up with conceptualization. In Indian Perspectives on Consciousness, Language and Self (Routledge, 2020), Marco Ferrante shows how a set o...

Paula C. Austin, "Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press, 2019) by Paula C. Austin, an Assistant Professor of history at Boston University, is not only a history of black y...

Victoria Brownlee, "Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Victoria Brownlee is the author of an exciting new contribution to discussions of early modern religion and literature. Her new book, Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England...

Diana Heney, “Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The pragmatist tradition in philosophy tends to focus on the pioneering work of its founding trio of Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey, who together proposed and developed a distinctive...

Soraya de Chadarevian, "Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“What are chromosomes? And what does it mean to treat them as visual objects?” asks Soraya de Chadarevian in her new book, Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Geno...

Samuel Gregg, "Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization" (Gateway, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

So what is Western Civilization, anyway? The term itself is under assault from progressives, as if the very notion is somehow passé and is not inclusive enough in a globalized world. But, the fact ...

Audra J. Wolfe, "Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Audra J. Wolfe, is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor and historian. Her book Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) examines the...

Peter Harrison, “The Territories of Science and Religion” (U. of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contemporary debates would lead you to believe that science and religion are eternally at odds with each other. In The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Peter...

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 ...

Jin Y. Park, "Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iry?p" (U of Hawaii Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iry?p (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) by Jin Y. Park, professor of philosophy and religion at American university, is an account of the Kor...

Perrin Selcer, "The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Having been born into a world in which people knew about anthropogenic global warming, I grew up in the “global environment.” Although the category “global environment” seems normal, if not natural...

Ronald R. Kline, “The Cybernetics Moment: Or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machi...

Jim Mason, "An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature" (Latern Books, 2002) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

First published by Simon & Schuster in 1993 and then by Continuum in 1998, Jim Mason’s An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature has become a classic. With a new Lantern edition ex...

G. Clinton Godart, "Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine. Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), G. Clinton Godart (Associate Professor at Tohoku University’s Department of G...

Matthew Gabriele, "Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2018) is a rich, comparative study, drawing on the scholarship of eleven authors who discuss topics in medieval cultural, in...

Lance deHaven-Smith, “Conspiracy Theory in America” (U of Texas Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lance deHaven-Smith‘s Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas Press, 2014) investigates how the Founders’ hard-nosed realism about the likelihood of elite political misconduct articulated...

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...

Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...

Harry O. Maier, "New Testament Christianity in the Roman World" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I had the opportunity to catch up with Harry O. Maier, professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Vancouver School of Theology, to discuss his new book, New Testament Christianity in ...

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

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

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...

Maurice Finocchiaro, "On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair (Oxford University Press, 2019), Maurice Finocchiaro shows that there were (and are) really two Galileo “af...

Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of ra...

Michael F. Robinson, “The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael F. Robinson‘s new book is such a pleasure to read, I cant even. It’s not just because you get to say Gambaragara over and over again if you read it aloud. (I recommend doing this, even if j...

Nicholas Guyatt, "Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation" (Basic Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that “all men are created equal”? Racism is the usual answer. Yet Nicholas Guyatt argues in Bind Us Ap...

Todd McGowan, "Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

An Interview with Todd McGowan about his recent Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2019). The book advocates for the relevance of Hegel’s dia...

Melanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith, "American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity" (UP of Florida, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As scholars and readers, we often view literary history in rigid, simplistic terms. We imagine that nineteenth-century aesthetic and thematic preoccupations withered away as 1899 became 1900, only ...

Eid Mohamed, “Arab Occidentalism: Images of America in the Middle East” (I.B. Tauris, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism, dramatically shifted how people think about the production of knowledge and representations of the Other. His ideas have been championed and critiqued with doz...

Andre E. Johnson, "No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner' (UP Mississippi, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

No Future in this Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner by Andre E. Johnson, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at the University of Memphis, and Director...

Jessie Labov, "Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture beyond the Nation" (Central European UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While there are still occasional uses of it today, the term "Central Europe" carries little of the charge that it did in the 1980s and early 1990s, and as a political and intellectual project it ha...

Eric Helleiner, "Forgotten Foundations: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of Bretton Woods has been told by countless historians. We have a good sense of the wartime context, the negotiations themselves, the roles of many of the main actors (especially Great Br...

Stephen L. Field, “The Duke of Zhou Changes: A Study and Annotated Translation of the Zhouyi” (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen L. Field‘s new translation and study of the Zhouyi offers an inspiring and fresh take that importantly differs from previous translators approaches to the text. The Duke of Zhou Changes: A ...

Daniela Vallega-Neu, "Heidegger's Poietic Writings: From Contributions to Philosophy to the Event" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholarship on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has traditionally focused on his magnum opus Being and Time and related earlier work, his later essays and lectures often relegated to an ambi...

Andrew Ollett, "Language of the Snakes" (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Ollett, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, argues in his book, Language of the Snakes: (University of California Pre...

Dany Christopher, "The Appropriation of Passover in Luke-Acts" (Mohr Siebeck, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most studies on the theme of Passover in the Gospel of Luke have been confined to the story of the Last Supper (Luke 22:1-20). Dany Christopher, on the contrary, seeks to show where, how, and why L...

Nicholas Vrousalis, “The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen: Back to Socialist Basics” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen: Back to Socialist Basics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), Nicholas Vrousalis (Leiden University) provides a thorough and complex reconstruction of G....

Marisa Anne Bass, "Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton UP, 2019) Marissa Anne Bass explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative ...

Nancy Sinkoff, "From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History" (Wayne State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (Wayne State University Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915-...

Noenoe K. Silva, "Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History" (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The process of colonialism seeks to demean Indigenous intellect and destroy Indigenous literary traditions. Reconstructing those legacies is thus an act of anti-colonial resistance. This is the imp...

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

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

Saladin Ambar, "Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era" (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1964, Malcolm X was invited to debate at the Oxford Union Society at Oxford University. The topic of debate that evening was the infamous phrase from Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican Convention...

Alan Taylor, "Thomas Jefferson’s Education" (W. W. Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alan Taylor is the author of Thomas Jefferson’s Education published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2019. Thomas Jefferson’s Education tells the story of how Jefferson’s vision for educating the next ...

Hüseyin Y?lmaz, "Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Islamic intellectual history, it is generally assumed that the Ottomans did not contribute much to Islamic thought. With his new book, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political...

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

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

Jimena Canales, "Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon...

Paul Hanebrink, "A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Harvard University Press, 2018), Paul Hanebrink, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, traces the complex histor...

McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...

Jon Sletvold, “The Embodied Analyst: From Freud and Reich to Relationality” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bodies, both the patient’s and the analyst, has been a neglected area of investigation in psychoanalysis for many years, despite it’s presence in Freud’s early theories and clinical work. In this ...

Charles L. Leavitt IV, "Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History" (U Toronto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Charles Leavitt steps back from the micro-histories focusing more narrowly on, for example, Italian cinema so as to we...

Paul J. Polgar, "Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul J. Polgar is the author of Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement, published by University of North Carolina Press in 2019. Standard-Bearers of Equality tells the sto...

Peter Zinoman, “Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung” (U California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over the course of the 1930s, Vietnamese author V? Tr?ng Ph?ng published eight novels, hundreds of works of narrative nonfiction, stories, plays, essays and articles. He was a best-selling writer i...

Gary A. Anderson, “Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition” (Yale University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition (Yale University Press, 2013), Gary A. Anderson, Hesburgh Professor of Catholic Theology at the University of Notre Dame, explores the th...

Andrew Milner, "Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism?" (Brill/Haymarket, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Brill/Haymarket, 2018) brings together twenty-six essays charting the development of Andrew Milner's distinctively Orwellian version of cul...

Jonathon Earle, “Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Dr. Jonathon Earle illustrates the rich and diverse in...

Peter L. Laurence, “Becoming Jane Jacobs” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter L. Laurence is an associate professor of urban design, history and theory at Clemson University School of Architecture. His book Becoming Jane Jacobs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) ...

Salman Sayyid, "Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order" (Hurst, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his paradigm shifting book, Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order (Hurst, 2014), which was recently translated into Arabic as Isti‘adat al-Khilafa Tafkik al-Isti‘mar wa al-Niza...

Cairns Craig, “The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence” (Edinburgh UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor Cairns Craig’s new book, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), which has been shortlisted for the Saltire History Book of the Ye...

John Bew, “Realpolitik: A History” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since its coinage in mid-19th century Germany, Realpolitik has proven both elusive and protean. To some, it represents the best approach to meaningful change and political stability in a world buff...

Rebecca E. Zietlow, "The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though the story of emancipation is well known in American history, the roles of many of the key figures involved in it are often overlooked. Among them is James Mitchell Ashley, the Ohio congressm...

Lilian Calles Barger, “The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A searching and richly textured history of the affinities and common origins of Latin American and North American liberation theologies, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation...

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

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

Richard Polt, "Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For some time, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been treated with a certain level of skepticism because of his engagement with the Nazi party, a skepticism that has resurfaced with the p...

Nathan Kravis, “On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sometimes, a couch is a only a couch, but not in Dr. Nathan Kravis’s new book, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017). In a live interview con...

David J. Meltzer, “The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past” (U Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David J. Meltzer‘s new book is a meticulous study of the controversy over human antiquity in America, a dispute that transformed North American archaeology as a practice and discipline, tracing it ...

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...

Daniel Stolz, “The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Both a history of science and a history of Islam, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Daniel Stolz tells the s...

Susannah Drake, “Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Susannah Drake, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College, in...

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...

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...

Erik Hammerstrom, “The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth-Century Engagements” (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Erik J. Hammerstrom‘s new book looks carefully at “what Chinese Buddhists thought about science in the first part of the twentieth century” by exploring what they wrote in articles and monographs d...

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...

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 ...

Heather Vacek, “Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness” (Baylor UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Should the member of a Christian congregation be injured in a car accident, that person will likely be the subject of public prayers and hospitality. But if that same person suffers a mental breakd...

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...

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...

Kenneth Garden, “The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and his Revival of the Religious Sciences” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) is one of the most famous Muslim thinkers in history. His autobiographical account, The Deliverer from Error, tells us of his spiritual crisis and transformative expe...

Douglas Murray, "The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity" (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

International bestselling author Douglas Murray examines in his latest book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019) the twenty-first century's most divisive is...

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...

John D. Wilsey, “American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea” (IVP Academic, 2015). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John D. Wilsey, assistant professor of history and Christian apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. His book American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History o...

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 ...

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...

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

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

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 ...

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...

Friederike Kind-Kovacs, “Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain” (Central European UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Central European University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed description of the social practices, debates and di...

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...

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...

Christian O. Christiansen, “Progressive Business: An Intellectual History of the Role of Business in American Society” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christian Olaf Christiansen is an associate professor in the history of ideas at Aarhus University, Denmark. His book Progressive Business: An Intellectual History of the Role of Business in Americ...

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...

Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and government efforts to promote a pure Aryan race. This view ...

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

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

Ryan Weber, "Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Circles in Music and Literature" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Musicologists have long tried to understand how cosmopolitanism and nationalism affected classical music. Ryan Weber takes on this task in his book, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Circles in Mus...

Dániel Margócsy, et al., “The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions” (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful new book that will long be on the shelves of a...

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

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

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...

Hervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History” (Alma, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry...

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...

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...

Christopher Dietrich, “Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization” (Cambridge University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 1973 oil crisis was an event of world-historic proportions, but the stories we tell about it often center the Global North. For instance, the first images that probably come to mind are of the ...

Shai Held, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence” (Indiana UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (Indiana University Press, 2013), Shai Held, Co-Founder, Dean and Chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar, offers a sympathetic, yet critical, e...

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...

Cameron B. Strang, “Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cameron Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) examines how colonists, soldiers, explor...

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...

S. Bergès, E. Hunt Botting, A. Coffee, "The Wollstonecraftian Mind" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019) is an extensive compendium of Mary Wollstonecraft as a writer, as an interlocutor, as a philosopher and political theorist, and as a feminist thinker. T...

Irfan Ahmad, “Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the last few decades, questions relating to Islam’s compatibility with liberal secular democracy, or the question of why Islam remains incompatible with Western liberal norms of thought and poli...

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...

Carol Zaleski, "The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings" (FSG, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Starting in the early 1930s, a small group of academics and writers met weekly in a pub in Oxford, England to discuss literature, religion, and ideas. Known as the Inklings, it was in part from the...

Adam D. Hensley, “Covenant Relationships and the Editing of the Hebrew Psalter” (T&T Clark, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Was the Hebrew Psalter purposefully shaped and arranged by editors to convey a particular theological message? Adam Hensley says yes. By examining the relationship between the Davidic covenant and ...

Adam J. Powell, “Irenaeus, Joseph Smith and God-Making Heresy” (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At first glance, second-century bishop Irenaeus of Lyon and Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints don’t seem to have much in common. After all, Irenaeus saw h...

Ayelet Hoffman Libson, "Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud (Cambridge UP, 2018) examines the emergence of self-knowledge as a determining legal consideration among the rabbis of Late Antiquity, from the third to the sev...

Ruth Gamble, “Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ruth Gamble’s Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a thorough and accessible study on reincarnation, the tulku tr...

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 ...

Peter J. Boettke, "F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I spoke with professor Peter J. Boettke the author of a great new book on Friedrich August von Hayek. Dr. Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Director of the F. A. Ha...

John Kaag, “American Philosophy: A Love Story” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. American Philosophy: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) won the John Dewey Prize from the Society for ...

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...

Jonathan A. C. Brown, "Slavery and Islam" (Oneworld Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his majestic and encyclopedic new book Slavery and Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2019), Jonathan A. C. Brown presents a sweeping analysis of Muslim intellectual, political, and social entanglements ...

Luis Cortest, “Philo’s Heirs: Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas” (Academic Studies Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The tensions found between Reason and Revelation, between the traditions of the Bible and Greek thought, were central to pre-modern philosophy and in a sense remain so today. We live in an age beho...

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...

Saladin Ambar, "Reconsidering American Political Thought: A New Identity" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Saladin Ambar has written a masterful examination and analysis of American political thought in this new book which does, in fact, reconsider our thinking about this particular branch of political ...

Quinn Slobodian, “Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The relationship between neoliberals and the state is one that has been endlessly debated. Are neoliberals anti-statist? Or are they advocates of a strong state? The seeming vagueness of neoliberal...

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 ...

Peter Bergamin, "The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology” (I. B. Tauris, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter Bergamin’s, new book, The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology (I. B. Tauris, 2019), is an intellectual biography of one of the most important propagators of the...

Neil Roberts, “A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass” (UP of Kentucky, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’ birth. It can hardly be said that scholars have neglected Douglass; indeed, he is one of the most written-about figures in American ...

Zeki Saritoprak, “Islam’s Jesus” (University of Florida Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Islam’s Jesus (University of Florida Press, 2015), Zeki Saritoprak explores an old topic from a fresh perspective. The status of Jesus in Islam has been of interest for centuries, and relates to...

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...

Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes the subtle argument that a process described by ...

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

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

Michael Menser, "We Decide!: Theories and Cases in Participatory Democracy" (Temple UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Participatory democracy calls for the creation and proliferation of practices and institutions that enable individuals and groups to better determine the conditions in which they act and relate to ...

Scott Spector, “Modernism Without Jews?: German Jewish Subjects and Histories” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Was there anything particularly Modern about Modern Jews? Was there something characteristically Jewish about Modernism? In this episode, we hear from Scott Spector, professor of History and German...

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

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

Adrian Johnston, "A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek and Dialectical Materialism" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2012, the world-renowned philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek released his 1000-page tome ?Less Than Nothing?, following it up afterwards with its shorter reformulation ?A...

Joseph Ben Prestel, “Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph Ben Prestel talks with us about Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 (Oxford University Press, 2017), blending together history of emotions, urban history...

Mark A. Noll, “In the Beginning was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His book, In the Beginning was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 (Oxford Universit...

Abraham Kuyper, "On Education" (Lexham Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abraham Kuyper was one of the most important theologians in the Dutch Reformed tradition – and a newspaper editor, university founder and Prime Minister to boot. Lexham Press are publishing his "Co...

Dagmar Herzog, “Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

‘Create two, three—many Freuds!’ That, Dagmar Herzog shows, was the forgotten slogan of the Cold War. With Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge University Press, 2017...

Steven J. Ellman, “When Theories Touch: A Historical and Theoretical Integration of Psychoanalytic Thought” (Karnac, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are theorists who seem to strive for integration and those who insist on fundamental differences, incompatibilities, and unbridgeable gulfs. Some write from an interdisciplinary position, exu...

Great Books: Catherine Stimpson on de Beauvior's "The Second Sex" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

"Woman is not born but made." This is only one of the powerful sentences in Simone de Beauvoir’s magisterial The Second Sex (1949). It means that there’s nothing natural about the fact that 50% of ...

Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in A Godly Nation” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation’s moral fabric, barred from holding public office, and branded as irreligious misfits in a na...

Eli Zaretsky, “Political Freud: A History” (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Back in the early 70s, Eli Zaretsky wrote for a socialist newspaper and was engaged to review a recently released book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism by Juliet Mitchell. First, he decided, he’d bette...

Keri Holt, "Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776-1830" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Keri Holt is the author of Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776-1830, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2019. Reading These United States explores...

Christopher Grasso, “Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War” (Oxford University Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Grasso is a professor of history at the College of William and Mary. His book Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2018) explore...

Nick Hopwood, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nick Hopwood‘s Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 2015) blends textual and visual analysis to answer the question of how images succeed or fail. Hopwood ...

Maria Dimova-Cookson, "Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Maria Dimova-Cookson's new book Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty (Routledge, 2019) offers an analysis of the distinction between positive and negative freedom building on the work of Consta...

Jonathan Smyth, “Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality” (Manchester UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his speech delivered to the National Convention on 18 Floréal (May 7, 1794), Maximilien Robespierre shocked his listeners as he attacked the proponents of atheism and dechristianization in the g...

Paul L. Heck, “Skepticism in Classical Islam: Moments of Confusion” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Skepticism is a familiar term to many of us conjuring up notions of doubt, uncertainty, and perhaps even unbelief. Yet, Skepticism did not always have such a narrow meaning. In fact Skepticism has ...

Daniel Kennefick, "No Shadow of Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Kennefick talks about resistance to relativity theory in the early twentieth century and the huge challenges that faced British astronomers who wanted to test the theory during the solar ecl...

Teishan A. Latner, “Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cuba’s grassroots revolution prevailed on America’s doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishm...

Richard H. King, “Arendt and America” (U of Chicago, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard H. King is Emeritus Professor of American and Canadian Studies at The University of Nottingham. His book Arendt and America (University of Chicago, 2015) is an intellectual biography and tr...

Kenneth R. Valpey, "Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does cow care in India have to offer modern Western discourse animal ethics? Why are cows treated with such reverence in the Indian context? Join us as we speak to Kenneth R. Valpey about his ...

Samuel Moyn, “Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia traced the evolution of the human rights revolution and argued that human rights as an ideology took the place of socialism and other utopian ideologies that failed. I...

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

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

Jonathan Erickson, "Imagination in the Western Psyche: From Ancient Greece to Modern Neuroscience" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Imagination is one of the most important elements of being human, but is most often assumed we know what it is, while rarely being analyzed. Here with me today is Jonathan Erickson to discuss his r...

D. G. Hart, “Calvinism: A History” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked with D. G. Hart, an historian at Hillsdale College, MI, and the author of many books, including Calvinism: A History (Yale University Press, 2013). Listed on the front cover of Time ...

Aaron W. Hughes, “Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford University Press, 2014), Aaron W. Hughes, the Philip S. Bernstein Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Rochest...

Eileen Botting, "The Wollstonecraftian Mind" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eileen Hunt Botting is Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and co-editor with Sandrine Berges and Alan Coffee of the anthology The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019). The collection ...

Meredith Lake, “The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History” (NewSouth Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History (NewSouth Publishing, 2018), historian Meredith Lake explores the various, often surprising ways Australians throughout history have read...

Daniel Geary, “Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Associate Professor in U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin. His book Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 20...

Gonzalo Lamana, "How 'Indians' Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory" (U Arizona Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory (University of Arizona Press, 2019), Dr. Gonzalo Lamana carefully investigates the w...

Fabio Lanza, “The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you work in Asian studies as a scholarly field, you should read Fabio Lanza’s new book. The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Duke University Press, 2017) takes as its ...

Chike Jeffers, “Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who famously made the decision in the 1970s to henceforth only produce his creative work in his native Gikuyu, rather than in English, authors the foreword to Listening to Oursel...

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America" (W. W. Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sister...

Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner, “Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (Yale University Press, 2018), edited by Yale University History and American Studies Professor Ned Blackhawk and University of Chicago Pos...

Edwin van de Haar, “Degrees of Freedom: Liberal Political Philosophy and Ideology” (Transaction Publishers, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“What exactly is liberalism?” The independent scholar Edwin van de Haar tackles this important question in his new book Degrees of Freedom: Liberal Political Philosophy and Ideology (Transaction Pu...

Christopher Cameron, "Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism" (Northwestern UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (Northwestern University Press, 2019) by Christopher Cameron, an Associate Professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Cha...

Sean Molloy, “Kant’s International Relations: The Political Theology of Perpetual Peace” (U Michigan Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does Kant have to tell us about International Relations? In Kant’s International Relations: The Political Theology of Perpetual Peace (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Sean Molloy, a Reade...

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

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

Jerome Gellman, "The History of Evil from the Mid-Twentieth Century to Today: 1950-2018" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” – Genesis 8:21 “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” - William Shakespeare We share with other ...

Sarah E. Igo, “The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah E. Igo is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018). Igo provides...

Federico Marcon, “The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan” (U of Chicago, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Federico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan ...

Yaacob Dweck, "Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected...

Olga Borovaya, “The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When did Ladino literature emerge? According to Dr. Olga Borovaya, author of The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and his Readers (Indiana University Press, 2017), the history of La...

Minghui Hu, “China’s Transition to Modernity: The New Classical Vision of Dai Zhen” (U of Washington Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Minghui Hu‘s new book takes Dai Zhen as a case study to look at broader transformations in classical scholarship, technical methodologies, politics, and their relationships in the Qing period. This...

Lydia Barnett, "After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of ...

Cyrus Ali Zargar, “The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism” (Oneworld, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cyrus Ali Zargar, Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, is the author of The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism (Oneworld, ...

Gordon H. Chang, “Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“There was China before there was an America, and it is because of China that America came to be.” According to Gordon H. Chang‘s new book, the idea of “China” became “an ingredient within the dev...

Alys Eve Weinbaum, "The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History (Duke University Press, 2019), University of Washington Professor of English Alys Eve Weinbaum inv...

Ahmad Dallal, “Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Middle Eastern and Islamic intellectual history, there has long been an assumption of decline in the eighteenth century, right before the nineteenth century, when the nahda or Arabic intellectua...

James Turner, “Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities” (Princeton University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Notre Dame University. His book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014) recovers...

Leor Halevi, "Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865-1935" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did Muslims respond to foreign goods in an age characterized by global exchange and European imperial expansion? What sort of legal reasoning did scholars apply in order to appropriate – or rej...

Keya Maitra, “Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the text – is it right to kill members of...

Mia E. Bay, et al., “Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women” (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mia Bay is a professor of history at Rutgers University, and Director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity. She is co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Ca...

Michel Boivin, "The Sufi Paradigm and the Makings of a Vernacular Knowledge in Colonial India" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Sufi Paradigm and the Makings of a Vernacular Knowledge in Colonial India: The Case of Sindh (1851-1929) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) by Michel Boivin maps the construction of a vernacular knowle...

Barbara Spackman, "Accidental Orientalists: Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands" (Liverpool UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Barbara Spackman’s riveting study identifies a strand of what it calls “Accidental Orientalism” in narratives by Italians who found themselves in Ottoman Egypt and Anatolia in the late 19th and ear...

Thomas Mulligan, “Justice and the Meritocratic State” (Routledge Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Mulligan’s new book, Justice and the Meritocratic State (Routledge Press, 2018), posits a theory of justice that is based on the allocation of valuable goods (jobs and appropriate income) ac...

Emran El-Badawi, “The Qur’an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Qur’an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions (Routledge, 2013) written by Emran El-Badawi, professor and director of the Arab Studies program at the University of Houston, is a recent addition to t...

Richard Muller, "Grace and Freedom: William Perkins and the Early Modern Reformed Understanding of Free Choice and Divine Grace" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

No-one has done more than Richard A. Muller to shape our approach to early modern historical theology. His earlier work, and most especially the four volumes of his Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmat...

Matthew D. O'Hara, "The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Latin America – especially colonial Latin America – is not particularly known for futurism. For popular audiences, the region’s history likely evokes images of book burning, the Inquisition, and ot...

Shachar M. Pinsker, “A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture” (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The café, long a European institution, was also a stimulant and a refuge for European Jewish culture. In cities across Europe, and later in Palestine, Israel, and the United States, Jewish journali...

Barry Allen, “Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition” (Harvard University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is knowledge, why is it valuable, and how might it be cultivated? Barry Allen‘s new book carefully considers the problem of knowledge in a range of Chinese philosophical discourses, creating a...

Ken Tully and Chad Leahy, "Jerusalem Afflicted: Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-century Crusade" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On Good Friday, 1626, Franciscus Quaresmius delivered a sermon in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem calling on King Philip IV of Spain to undertake a crusade to 'liberate' the Holy Land...

Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, "Nature, Empire, And Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World" (Stanford UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the late 1500s, the mines of Potosí –a mountain in southern Bolivia — produced 60% of the world’s silver. It was a place of great wealth and terrible suffering. It is also a place, Jorge Canizar...

Irina Dumitrescu, “The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A sharply observed study of the representations of education found in Anglo-Saxon texts, Irina Dumitrescu’s The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press 2018) i...

Nancy Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere” (Polity, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How is “the public sphere” best conceptualized on a transnational scale? Nancy Fraser (The New School for Social Research) explores this pressing question in her book Transnationalizing the Public ...

Joanne Paul, "Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While it has often been recognized that counsel formed an essential part of the political discourse in early modern England, the precise role that it occupied in the development of political thinki...

Jason Read, "The Politics of Transindividuality" (Haymarket Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many major political questions today revolve around questions of human nature; what sort of people we are and what sort of people we're capable of being constitute both the goals and limits of the ...

Sucharita Adluri, “Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse?  While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideo...

Meredith K. Ray, “Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Exploring the work of Fonte and that of many other incredi...

Jeremy M. Glick, "The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution" (NYU Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if the Haitian Revolution, perhaps the only “successful” Black revolution in history, weren’t over? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Jeremy Matthew...

Paul Robinson, "Russian Conservatism" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor Paul Robinson's new book, Russian Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a comprehensive examination of the roots and development of the hardy strain of conservative political t...

Jeffrey Dudas, “Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism” (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With the rise of President Donald Trump as the head of the Republican Party, once a Democrat and liberal on many social issues, what does it mean to be a conservative today? What is the glue that c...

Kocku von Stuckrad, “The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000” (De Gruyter, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Science and religion are often paired as diametric opposites. However, the boundaries of these two fields were not always as clear as they seem to be today. In The Scientification of Religion: An H...

R. H. Helmholz, "Natural Law in Court: A History of Legal Theory in Practice" (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

R. H. Helmholz's book Natural Law in Court (Harvard UP, 2015) serves as a guide to the uses of natural law in the past. It shows how lawyers, judges and jurists used natural law to reason and argue...

Brandon R. Byrd, "The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti" (U Penn Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brandon R. Byrd is the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. The Black Republic examines the multitude of...

Sarah Igo, “The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To write a book on such a multifarious and vast, if not ubiquitous, concept as privacy is a tall task for the historian. Sarah Igo, associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, took thi...

James A. Secord, “Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library, Visions of Science: Books...

Betty Rojtman, "The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought: A Longing for the Abyss (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) analyses a cultural phenomenon that goes to the very roots of Western civilization: the...

Adriel Trott, "Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation" (Edinburgh UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Adriel M. Trott argues for understanding the relationship of matter and form in Aristotl...

Eran Kaplan, “Beyond Post-Zionism” (SUNY Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Beyond Post-Zionism (SUNY Press, 2015), Eran Kaplan locates the post-Zionist debates, which have brought into question some of the core tenets of Zionist ideology, within the context of the chan...

Gary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritu...

Jon Hoover, "Ibn Taymiyya" (Oneworld, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ibn Taymiyya is one of the most prolific and influential Islamic thinkers to date, and was even the only pre-modern Muslim author cited in the 9/11 Report. His supporters and detractors alike have ...

G. Edward White, "Law in American History, Volume III: 1930-2000" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For nearly two decades the renowned legal historian G. Edward White has been writing a multi-volume history of law in America. In his third and concluding volume, Law in American History, Volume II...

Steven and Ben Nadler, “Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority and contemporary thinking—sometimes risking exc...

M. Alper Yalcinkaya, “Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What were Ottomans talking about when they talked about science? In posing and answering that question (spoiler: they were talking about people), M. Alper Yalcinkaya‘s new book Learned Patriots: D...

K. Yazdani and D. M. Menon, "Capitalisms: Towards a Global History" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020), edited by Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip M. Menon, aims to decenter work on the history of capitalism by looking at the longue durée ...

Peter Adamson, "Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 3" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is no easy task to survey and present a comprehensive history of philosophy of an entire intellectual tradition to a broad public audience without compromising on the scholarly rigor demanded by...

Ata Anzali, “‘Mysticism’ in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept” (U South Carolina Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his sparkling new book, “Mysticism” in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), Ata Anzali, Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, ...

Kevin M. Schultz, “Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties” (W. W. Norton, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties (W.W. Norton, 2015), Kevin M. Schultz has given us a lively and colorful narrative history that captures the character of two...

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, "Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean" (U Illinois Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Long before the English became involved in the African slave trade, they imagined Africans as monstrous and deformed beings. The English drew on pre-existing European ideas about monstrosity and de...

Amy Aronson, "Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Aronson is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Fordham University and former editor at Working Woman and Ms. magazines. Her biography Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Lif...

Eliyahu Stern, “Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (Yale University Press, 2018) is a radical new book that uncovers a hitherto ignored intellectual movement in Jewish Eastern Europe, and...

Marion Holmes Katz, “Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice” Columbia University Press, 2014 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Recently, there have been various debates within the Muslim community over women’s mosque attendance. While contemporary questions of modern society structure current conversations, this question, ...

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

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

Richard Whatmore, "Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the Fre...

William Kuby, “Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

William Kuby is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. His book, Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States (Cambridge U...

Emily Kuriloff, “Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so e...

Uma Majmudar, “Gandhi and Rajchandra: The Making of the Mahatma” (Lexington Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This book traces the little-known yet unparalleled influence of Shrimad Rajchandra, Jain zaveri (jeweller)-cum-spiritual seeker, on Mahatma Gandhi. In examining original Gujarati writings of both G...

Joshua Simon, "The Ideology of the Creole Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joshua Simon’s The Ideology of the Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, compares the pol...

Alexander Bevilacqua, “The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2018), Alexander Bevilacqua uncovers a different side of the European Enlightenment, at least with...

Amy Kittelstrom, “The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition” (Penguin Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Kittelstrom is an associate professor of history at Sonoma State University. In her book The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition (Penguin Press, 2015), Kittel...

Conservatism is Always Evolving: A Discussion with Edmund Fawcett from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For two hundred years, conservatism has defied its reputation as a backward-looking creed by confronting and adapting to liberal modernity. By doing so, the Right has won long periods of power and ...

Wilson Jeremiah Moses, "Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Greek mythology Prometheus is the trickster Titan who gives fire to humanity. As Wilson Jeremiah Moses explains in his book Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus (Cambridge University Press, 201...

Elizabeth M. Sanders, “Genres of Doubt: Science Fiction, Fantasy and the Crisis of Victorian Faith” (McFarland, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Victorians left an indelible stamp on culture that continues to be in evidence today, not least of which is their refinement of the realist fiction medium known as the novel and their innovatio...

Ananya Vajpeyi, “Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Harvard University Press, 2012) by Ananya Vajpeyi is a rethinking of the self in self-rule, as understood in the ideas generated and r...

Paolo Astorri, "Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany (ca. 1520-1720)" (Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany (ca. 1520-1720) (Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh, 2019), Paolo Astorri shows how the Protestant Reformation influence European law. Martin L...

Afshin Matin-Asgari, "Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Following the Iranian Revolution of 1978—79, public and scholarly interest in Iran have skyrocketed, with a plethora of attempts seeking to understand and explain the events which led up to that mo...

Sebastian Conrad, “What is Global History?” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The last two decades have seen a surge in global histories, be they global histories of food, of ideas, or social movements.  But why this move away from strictly national and regional histories? I...

Thomas Kemple, “Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Kemple‘s new book is an extraordinarily thoughtful invitation to approach Max Weber (1864-1920) as a performer, and to experience Weber’s work by attending to his spoken and written voice. I...

N. Chare and D. Williams, "Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando" (Berghahn Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Sonderkommando--the "special squad" of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau--comprise one of the most fascinating and troubl...

Erin Schoneveld, "Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-Garde" (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Befitting an art history book, Erin Schoneveld’s Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-Garde (Brill, 2018) is a beautifully packaged analysis of...

Keith M. Woodhouse, “The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Environmentalists often talk like revolutionaries but agitate like reformers. But however moderate its tactics, environmentalism has led Americans to questions rarely asked: Is economic growth nece...

Andrew Cayton, “Love in the Time of Revolution” (UNC Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Cayton is a distinguished professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In his book Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change (Unive...

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

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

Chet Van Duzer, "Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chet Van Duzer's new book Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends (Springer, 2019), presents the first detailed study of one of the most important...

Christopher G. White, “Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irreconcilable ways of understanding the world, whose ...

Carol Faulkner, “Lucretia Mott’s Heresy” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carol Faulkner is Professor of History at Syracuse University. Her book Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) i...

Doug Specht, "Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping" (U London Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the...

Lior Sternfeld, "Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran (Stanford University Press, 2019) by Lior Sternfeld presents the first systematic study of the rich and variegated history of Jews ...

Elias Muhanna, “The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Elias Muhanna tells the story of an e...

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 ...

Matthew W. Slaboch, "A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Has history worked out the way so many have hoped? What did “progress” used to look like and who could possibly have been against it? What areas of human life and political realms does the term “pr...

Lesley Chamberlain, "Ministry of Darkness: How Sergei Uvarov Created Conservative Modern Russia" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Count Sergey Semyonovich Uvarov, once proclaimed by Aleksandr Herzen as a ‘Prometheus of our day’, has in the past 160 years become something of an also-ran in Russian History. Notwithstanding his ...

Adam Kuper, “Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth-Century” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adam Kuper‘s Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth-Century (Fourth Edition; Routledge, 2014) is an excellent, comprehensive tour through one of the most important an...

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...

Judith G. Coffin, "Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired Coffin to explore the intimate bond betwee...

Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...

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...

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...

Margrit Pernau, "Emotions and Colonial Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her stunning and conceptually adventurous new book Emotions and Colonial Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor (Oxford University Press, 2020), Margrit Pernau examines the varied a...

Philipp Stelzel, "History after Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise" (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The decades following the end of World War II witnessed the establishment of a large and diverse German-American scholarly community studying modern German history. As West Germany's formerly deepl...

Samuel England, “Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts” (Edinburgh UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his thrilling and sparkling new book, Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Samuel England, Assista...

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 ...

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

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

Christine D. Baker, "Medieval Islamic Sectarianism" (Amsterdam UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do contemporary events shape the ways in which we read, understand, and interpret historical processes of identity formation? How can we resist framing conflicts of the past through frameworks ...

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...

Donna J. Drucker, “The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge” (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Donna J. Drucker is a guest professor at Darmstadt Technical University in Germany. Her book The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburg Pres...

Nadia Nurhussein, "Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America (Princeton University Press, 2019), Nadia Nurhussein explores late nineteenth and twentieth century African American cultural engagement wit...

James Gordon Finlayson, "The Habermas-Rawls Debate" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are perhaps the two most renowned and influential figures in social and political philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1990s, they had a fam...

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”...

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...

Michael Walzer, "A Foreign Policy for the Left" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In my old age, I try to argue more quietly, though I still believe that sharp disagreement is a sign of political seriousness. What engaged citizens think and say matters; we should aim to get it r...

David Brandenberger, "Stalin's Master Narrative" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this interview, David Brandenberger discusses his new edited volume (created in concert with RGASPI archivist and Russian historian Mikhail Zelenov) Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition...

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...

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...

Elisabeth Paquette, "Universal Emancipation: Race Beyond Badiou" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is Badiou’s theory of emancipation? For whom is this emancipation possible? Does emancipation entail an indifference to difference? In Universal Emancipation: Race Beyond Badiou (University of...

Richard J. Bernstein, "Why Read Hannah Arendt Now" (Polity, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nobody should feel excited about the renewed relevance of Hannah Arendt's work today. Her foresight about the fragility of democratic life is relevant for the worst possible reasons: populism, whit...

Kyla Schuller, “The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beginning with a discussion about Black Lives Matter may seem like an unlikely place to start a book about nineteenth century science and culture. However, by contrasting Black lives with White fee...

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...

James Simpson, "Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Protestant Reformation looms large in our cultural imagination. In the standard telling, it’s the moment the world went modern. Casting off the shackles and superstitions of medieval Catholicis...

Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, "The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great" (Liverpool UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great (Liverpool University Press, 2019) is the first scholarly monograph devoted to the comprehensive analysis of the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of ...

William A. Edmundson, “John Rawls: Reticent Socialist” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Rawls is easily the most celebrated and influential political philosopher of the 20th Century, and his impact remains remarkably strong today.  The central concepts with which his theory of ju...

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...

Spencer Critchley, "Patriots of Two Nations: Why Trump Was Inevitable and What Happens Next" (McDavid Media, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

America is in a Cold Civil War, between people who see each other as threats to the country — but themselves as patriots. How can that be? They are patriots of two nations. In Patriots of Two Natio...

Julian Havil, "Curves for the Mathematically Curious" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Julian Havil about his latest book Curves for the Mathematically Curious: An Anthology of the Unpredictable, Historical, Beautiful, and Romantic (Princeton University Press, 2019)...

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...

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 ...

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

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

What are Empires and Why do they Matter? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You hear a lot about "empires," but what are they? Do they still exist? And why does it matter? Today I talked to Jeremy Black about empires, historical and present. Jeremy has thought deeply about...

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...

Meir Shahar and John Kieschnick, “India in the Chinese Imagination” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), eleven scholars (including editors John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar) examine the Chinese re...

Tamura Lomax, “Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture” (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the central threads in the public discourse on Black womanhood is the idea of the “Jezebel.” This trope deems Black women and girls as dishonorable and sexually deviant and the stereotype is...

David Hayton, "Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier" (Manchester UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Acclaimed after the Second World War as England's greatest historian, Sir Lewis Namier was an eastern European immigrant who came to idealise the English gentleman and enjoyed close friendship with...

Ethan L. Menchinger, “The First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasif” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ethan L. Menchinger‘s The First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasif (Cambridge University Press, 2017) traces the life and career of Ahmed Vasif (ca. 1735-1806), a promi...

Matthew Stanley, “Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electrom...

Adam Knowles, "Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s influence over the last several decades of philosophy is undeniable, but his place in the canon has been called into question in recent years in the wake o...

Ian Parker, "Psychoanalysis, Clinic, and Context: Subjectivity, History, and Autobiography" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are many pathways into the world of psychoanalysis. Some arrive from fields like psychiatry and psychology; some from literature, philosophy, and the humanities; and others from political org...

Catherine Soussloff, “Foucault on Painting” (U Minnesota Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Foucault on Painting (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Catherine Soussloff discusses an area of Foucault’s development that has remained largely overlooked: his engagement with painting.  I...

Martin Shuster, “Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enl...

Sree Padma, "Vicissitudes of the Goddess: Reconstructions of the Gramadevata in India's Religious Traditions" (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Vicissitudes of the Goddess: Reconstructions of the Gramadevata in India's Religious Traditions (Oxford UP, 2013), Padma (Bowdoin College) focuses on two types of Gramadevatas or goddesses: deif...

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...

John Munro, “The Anticolonial Front: The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Munro’s new book, The Anticolonial Front: The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a transnational study that traces the persistenc...

Sean Forner, “German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945” (Cambridge University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Federal Republic of Germany is often held up today as one of the world’s great democracies, where the commitment to such ideals as transparency, careful deliberation, social and political equal...

Brian Weatherson, "A History of Philosophy Journals. Volume 1: Evidence from Topic Modeling, 1876-2013" (2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anglophone philosophy in the twentieth century was centered, to an unprecedented extent, around journals: periodical publications that aimed to present (one vision of) the best philosophical work o...

Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press, 2019), Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem...

Katharine Gerbner, “Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In her recent book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the P...

Erik C. Banks, “The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived” (Cambridge University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, the American psychologist William James, and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell shared an interest in explaining the mind in naturalistic terms – unified wi...

Karen Taliaferro, "The Possibility of Religious Freedom: Early Natural Law and the Abrahamic Faiths" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Religious freedom debates set blood boiling. Just consider notable Supreme Court cases of recent years such as Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission or Little Sisters of the Poor...

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...

Paul Cartledge, “Democracy: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Western concept of democracy has a lineage dating back to the classical world. Paul Cartledge’s book Democracy: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2016) details its origins in ancient Greece and ...

Matthew A. Sutton, “American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew Avery Sutton is the author of three books: Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (2007), Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with D...

Ernest Freeberg, "A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Gilded Age America, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in environments that were dirty and dangerous to man and animal alike. The industrial city brought suffering, but it also inspired a co...

Carlo Bonomi, "The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis, Vol. I," (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carlo Bonomi's two-volume set dreams the foundation of psychoanalysis as it writes its history. The work animates the reader's imagination, inviting them to journey the interwoven paths of Sigmund ...

Sam Lebovic, “Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Appeals to “press freedom” can be heard from across the political spectrum. But what those appeals mean varies dramatically. Sam Lebovic, in his excellent new book, Free Speech and Unfree News: The...

Todd H. Weir, “Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ne...

Alexis Wick, "The Red Sea In Search of Lost Space" (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world’s most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed ...

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...

Barry Wimpfheimer, “The Talmud: A Biography” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

?In The Talmud: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2018), Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, associate professor of religious studies and law at Northwestern University, introduces the reader to the Ba...

Edward Ross Dickinson, “Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moder...

Boel Berner, "Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th-Century Medicine and Beyond" (Transcript Verlag, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia; proposed it...

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...

Dan Bendarz, “East German Intellectuals and the Unification of Germany: An Ethnographic View” (Palgrave, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, East German Intellectuals and the Unification of Germany: An Ethnographic View (Palgrave 2017), Dan Bednarz, Assistant Professor at Bristol Community College, examines the impact o...

William J. Turkel, “Spark from the Deep” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“In a sense, all life consists of the colonization of an electric world. But to see that, we have to go back to the very beginning.” William J. Turkel‘s new book traces the emergence and inhabiting...

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

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

Annabel L. Kim, "Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions" (Ohio State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (The Ohio State University Press, 2018), Annabel Kim tangles with the question of difference so central to French feminism, theory...

Mira Beth Wasserman, “Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities” (U Penn Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Talmud’s m...

Steven Conn, “Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Americans have a paradoxical relationship with cities, Steven Conn argues in his new book,Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2014). Nearly ...

Elleni Centime Zeleke, "Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016" (Haymarket Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals where they explored the relationship between socia...

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...

Omina El Shakry, “The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Often, when writing the intellectual history of the Middle East, we make assumptions about the influence of ideas from other places on the Middle East itself. We assume what ideas are being adapted...

Mike O’Connor, “A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism” (University Press of Kansas 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mike O’Connor is the author of A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism (University Press of Kansas 2014). He has also published articles in Contemporary Pragmati...

Joshua Kotin, "Utopias of One" (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joshua Kotin’s Utopias of One (Princeton University Press, 2017) analyzes a particular and peculiar sub-genre of utopian literature. Kotin identifies works by Thoreau, Dubois, the Mandel’shtams, an...

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...

Michael Brenner, “In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2018), Professor Michael Brenner, a historian of Jews and of Israel who teaches both at Ludwig Maximilian U...

John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret...

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

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

Elijah Millgram, "John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to an intuitive view, lives are meaningful when they manifest a directedness or instantiate a project such that the disparate events and endeavors “add up to” a life.  John Stuart Mill’s ...

Keisha N. Blain, “Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom” (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Keisha N. Blain teaches African American and gender and women’s history at the University of Pittsburg. Her book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (...

Ajay K. Mehrotra, “Making the Modern American Fiscal State” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Prior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, the United States did not have a national system of taxation–it had a regional system, a system linked to political parties, and a system that, in m...

Jerry Gershenhorn, "Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) by Jerry Gershenhorn is a history of the struggle for Black equality in Nor...

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 ...

Gary Dorrien, “The New Abolition: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The black social gospel–formulated and given voice by abolitionists and post-reconstruction Black men and women–took the United States by storm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Black ...

Mariam al-Attar, “Islamic Ethics: Divine Command Theory in Arabo-Islamic Thought” (Routledge, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mariam al-Attar, Islamic Ethics: Divine Command Theory in Arabo-Islamic Thought (Routledge, 2010)  explores the meaning, origin and development of “Divine Command Theory” in Islamic thought. In the...

Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places" (Simon and Schuster, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with...

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...

Marcella Corsi et al., “Classical Economics Today: Essays in Honor of Alessandro Roncaglia” (Anthem Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I met in Rome, at Sapienza University, with two of the three editors of a great new book in economics. Marcella Corsi is professor of economics at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and editor of ...

Iqbal Sevea, “The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The towering Indian Muslim poet and intellectual Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) is among the most contested figures in the intellectual and political history of modern Islam. Heralded by some as the fath...

Harrison Perkins, "Catholicity and the Covenant of Works: James Ussher and the Reformed Tradition" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians of early modern religion recognise the importance of the development of covenant theology in the formation of Calvinism. Harrison Perkins, who teaches systematic theology at Edinburgh Th...

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...

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, “Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels and Jihad” (I. B. Tauris, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her fascinating and path paving new book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels and Jihad (I. B. Tauris, 2017), Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Assistant Professor of Relig...

Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman, “The Third Reich Sourcebook” (U California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Primary source readers represent an unusual historical genre. Unlike editions, their aim is not to enable the reader to hear, as clearly as possible, the voice of a single historical personage or i...

John Loughlin, "Human Dignity in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dignity is a fundamental aspect of our lives, yet one we rarely pause to consider; our understandings of dignity, on individual, collective and philosophical perspectives, shape how we think, act a...

David S. Richeson, "Tales of Impossibility" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David S. Richeson's book Tales of Impossibility: The 2000-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2019) is the fascinating story of the 2000 year que...

Alexus McLeod, “Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time” (Lexington Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The ancient Maya are popularly known for their calendar, but their concept of time and the metaphysics surrounding that conception are not. In Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time (Lexingt...

Richard Starr, “Equal As Citizens: The Tumultuous and Troubled History of a Great Canadian Idea” (Formac, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“We are not half a dozen provinces. We are one great Dominion,” Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald proudly declared. More than a century later, Canada has 10 provinces and three north...

Ian Kumekawa, "The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics" (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The work of Alfred Charles Pigou may not be as well known to people today as that of his contemporary John Maynard Keynes, but as Ian Kumekawa details in his book The First Serious Optimist: A. C. ...

J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...

Joshua Parens, “Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy” (U Rochester Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In today’s episode, I am joined by Joshua Parens to discuss his innovative and engaging book Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy (University of Rochester Press, 2016). Whi...

John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Scie...

Sanjay Lal, "Gandhi's Thought and Liberal Democracy" (Lexington Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is religion indispensable to public life? What can Gandhi’s thought contribute to the modern state? With an intense focus on both the depth and practicality of Mahatma Gandhi's political and religi...

Saul Cornell, "The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is the first book to unite a top down and bottom up account o...

Daniel Bessner, “Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual” (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Bessner’s Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Cornell University Press, 2018) provides a fascinating account of Hans Speier, an oft forgotten yet highly...

John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of o...

Lea David, "The Past Can't Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Past Can't Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lea David critically investigates the relationship between human rights and memory, sugg...

Ricky W. Law, "Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University ...

David A. Hollinger, “Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World and Changed America” (Princeton UP, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David A. Hollinger‘s Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World and Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017) offers a history of how American missionaries, their child...

Ovamir Anjum, “Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ovamir Anjum explores a timely topic, even though his focus is hundreds of years in the ...

Abla Hasan, "Decoding the Egalitarianism of the Qur’an: Retrieving Lost Voices on Gender" (Lexington Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is it possible to interpret the Qur’an using the Qur’an alone? Is a feminist interpretation of controversial verses such as 4:34, the notorious “wife-beating” verse, possible? What evidence is ther...

Binyamin Appelbaum, "The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society" (Little Brown, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Think economics is the "dismal science" with abstract formulas that have no impact on life as it is actually lived? Think again.  In The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Frac...

Chad Montrie, “The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism” (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t start the Civil War and Silent Spring didn’t start the environmental movement. In The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (University...

David B. Dennis, “Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I occasionally teach Western Civilization and you may have taken it in college. We all know the drill: Greeks-Romans-Dark Ages-Middle Ages-Renaissance-Reformation-Scientific Revolution-Enlightenmen...

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

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

Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, "Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mah?bh?rata Textual Criticism" (Anthem Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Hindu great epic, Mah?bh?rata, exists today in hundreds of variant manuscripts across India. These manuscripts were painstakingly examined, sorted and reconstituted into the official Critical E...

Hanna Engelmeier, “Man, the Ape: Anthropology and the Reception of Darwin in Germany, 1850-1900” (Bohlau, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The relationship between humans and apes has been discussed for centuries. That discussion took a new turn with the publication and reception of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natura...

David N. Livingstone, “Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David N. Livingstone‘s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the same Scottish Calvinist heritage engaged with Darwin a...

Christopher J. Blythe, "Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse (Oxford UP, 2020), Christopher James Blythe examines apocalypticism across the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-...

Dilek Huseyinzadegan, "Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics" (Northwestern UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2019), Dilek Huseyinzadegan analyzes Kant’s political writings by attending to the role of history, anthropology, and geography...

Daniel J. Kapust, “Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Kapust‘s book, Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art (Cambridge University Press, 2018), is a rich and fascinating exploration of political thought through th...

Bruce Ackerman, “We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bruce Ackerman is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. His book, We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013) fills out the constitutio...

Takeshi Morisato, "Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2019) by Takeshi Morisato is a book that brings together the work of two significant figures in contemporary philosophy. By cons...

David Lindsay Roberts, "Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The institutional history of mathematics in the United States comprises several entangled traditions—military, civil, academic, industrial—each of which merits its own treatment. David Lindsay Robe...

Chad Alan Goldberg, “Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought” (U Chicago Press, 2017 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Chad Alan Goldberg looks at how social thinkers from Karl Marx, to Emile Durkheim, to Robert P...

Adam Phillips, “Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst” (Yale UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as...

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

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

Yael Almog, "Secularism and Hermeneutics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed ...

Stephen Cummings, et al., “A New History of Management” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Did Abraham Maslow actually ever draw a pyramid of hierarchy of needs? Did Kurt Lewin devote substantial work on the development of a change management theory? Why do we omit or misrepresent import...

Ari Joskowicz, “The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1873, the German scientist Rudolf Virchow declared in Parliament that liberals were locked in a Kulturkampf, a “culture war” with the forces of Catholicism, which he viewed as the chief hindranc...

Alison Games, "Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory" (Oxford UP, 2020 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

My Lai, Wounded Knee, Sandy Hook: the place names evoke grief and horror, each the site of a massacre. Massacres-the mass slaughter of people-might seem as old as time, but the word itself is not. ...

Eric D. Weitz, "A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who has the right to have rights? Motivated by Hannah Arendt’s famous reflections on the question of statelessness the book tells a non-linear global story of the emergence and transformations of h...

Hoda Yousef, “Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930” (Stanford UP, from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Literacy is often portrayed as a social good. Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Hoda Yousef has a different take ...

Craig Martin, “Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Craig Martin‘s new book carefully traces religious arguments for and against Aristotelianism from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. Based on a close reading of a staggering array of pr...

Annelien de Dijn, "Freedom: An Unruly History" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We tend to think of freedom as something that is best protected by carefully circumscribing the boundaries of legitimate state activity. But who came up with this understanding of freedom, and for ...

Ussama Makdisi, "Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Building on nearly two decades of scholarship about sectarianism and communal relations in the Modern Middle East, Ussama Makdisi’s latest book, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Mak...

Marcus Rediker, “The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolutionary Abolitionist” (Beacon Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the annals of abolitionist history, names like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, the Grimke sisters, and Harriet Tubman are well known. Dr. Marcus Rediker‘s new book, The Fearless Benj...

Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. Catching Nat...

Durba Mitra, "Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deplo...

Mark McClish, "The History of the Artha??stra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Was ancient India ruled by politics or religion? In The History of the Artha??stra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Mark McClish explores the Artha??...

Reiko Ohnuma, “Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Reiko Ohnuma‘s Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful treatment of animals in Indian Buddhist literature. Although they are l...

J. Matthias Determann, “Historiography in Saudi Arabia: Globalization and the State in the Middle East” (Tauris, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Saudi Arabia is, for most Westerners, a mysterious place. It’s home to one of the most conservative forms of Islam around and ruled by one of the least democratic regimes in the world. Yet it’s a g...

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

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

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, "Revolution and Its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this new book, Revolution and its Discontents, Political Thought and Reform in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi’s (of Goldsmiths University of London) studies...

Alexander Orwin, “Redefining the Muslim Community: Ethnicity, Religion, and Politics in the Thought of Alfarabi” (U Penn Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abu Nasr Al-Farabi (c. 872 – c. 950) a philosopher who wrote on politics, metaphysics, and logic as well as mathematics, psychology, and music, was known by Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the “se...

Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narcissism” (Harvard University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists.” From this opening, Elizabeth Lunbeck‘s new book proceeds to offer a fa...

Aaron Koller, "Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought (Jewish Publication Society, 2020), Aaron Koller, professor of Near Eastern and Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University, pr...

Esau McCaulley, "Sharing in the Son's Inheritance: Davidic Messianism and Paul's Worldwide Interpretation of the Abrahamic Land Promise in Galatians" (T and T Clark, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Esau McCaulley is the author of Sharing in the Son's Inheritance: Davidic Messianism and Paul's Worldwide Interpretation of the Abrahamic Land Promise in Galatians, published in 2017 by T&T Cla...

Alison McQueen, “Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alison McQueen explores the apocalyptic thought of political theorists Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau in her new book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge Uni...

Hans Noel, “Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hans Noel is the author of Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Noel is an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University. He is als...

Teresa A. Goddu, "Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press) is a richly illustrated history of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its print, material, ...

Erika Milam, "Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Erika Milam talks about the scientific search for human nature, a project that captured the attention of paleontologists, anthropologists, and primatologists in the years after World War II. Milam ...

Matt K. Lewis, “Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump” (Hachette, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Political commentator Matt K. Lewis warns his fellow conservatives that their movement is going off the rails in Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump (H...

Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cent...

Matt Christman, "The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason" (Simon & Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Let’s face it, 2020 has been a hell of a year. We could all use a good laugh. But as historians and/or fans of history, we have to read something historically grounded, right? Well, fear not! Felix...

Patrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (Bloomsbury) is a book by Patrick Ffrench, Professor of French at Kings College. It is a comprehensively researched and finely argued book that ...

Grégoire Mallard, "Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since Marcel Mauss published his foundational essay "The Gift" in 1925, many anthropologists and specialists of international relations have seen in the exchange of gifts, debts, loans, concessions...

Robert Darnton, “A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Five decades ago, a young scholar named Robert Darnton followed up on a footnote that took him to the archives of the “Typographical Society of Neuchatel”(S.T.N.) in Switzerland, not far from the F...

Michael Saler, “As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford, 2012), historian Michael Saler explores the precursors of the current proliferation of digital virtual worlds. S...

Malcolm Keating, "Controversial Reasoning in Indian Philosophy: Major Texts and Arguments on Arthâpatti" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do we know what we know?  The most prominent means of knowledge for Indian philosophers are direct perception (pratyak?a), inference (anum?na) and authority (?abda). Then there is the much deba...

Hans Boersma, "Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition" (Eerdmans, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Hans Boersma is the author of Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition, published in 2018 by Eerdmans. He holds the Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Chair in Ascetical Theology a...

Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” (New Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since it was published in 2016, Arlie Russell Hochschild‘s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016) has been many times heralded as necessary read...

Richard Weikart, “Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many years now, historians have wondered whether Hitler had any sort of consistent ideology. His writings are rambling and confusing. His speeches are full of plain lies. His “table talk” refle...

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...

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

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

Menachem Fisch, “Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency” (U Chicago Press, 2017 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religio...

Donna-Lee Frieze, “Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide.  But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted thei...

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 (...

Benjamin Kahan, "The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this installment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Benjamin Kahan, Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at LSU, about his newest work, The Book of Minor Per...

Didem Havlioglu, “Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History” (Syracuse UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse University Press, 2017) by Didem Havlioglu is at once an intellectual history and biography of sor...

Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Open Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jamie Cohen-Cole‘s new book explores the emergence of a discourse of creativity, interdisciplinarity, and the “open mind” in the context of Cold War American politics, education, and society. The ...

Steven Heine, "Readings of D?gen's 'Treasury of the True Dharma Eye'"(Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Sh?b?genz?) is the masterwork of D?gen (1200–1253), founder of the S?t? Zen Buddhist sect in Kamakura-era Japan. It is one of the most important Zen Buddhist co...

Melissa E. Sanchez, "Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Putting premodern theology and poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics, Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition (NYU Press, 2019) reassess the commo...

Richard Candida Smith, “Improvised Continent: Pan-American and Cultural Exchange” (Penn Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Candida Smith’s new book Improvised Continent: Pan-American and Cultural Exchange (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), offers a richly detailed cultural history of pan-Americanism and ...

Stephen C. Neff’s Justice Among Nations: A History of International Law (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen C. Neff‘s Justice Among Nations: A History of International Law (Harvard UP, 2014) is a book of breathtaking scope, telling the story of the development of international law from Ancient ti...

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...

Larry E. Morris, "A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of the creation of the Book of Mormon has been told many times, and often ridiculed. A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon (Oxford University Press, 2019), by Larry E. Morris, prese...

Vivian Liska, “German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy” (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Indiana University Press, 2016), Vivian Liska, Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Un...

Steven L. Jacobs, “Lemkin on Genocide” (Lexington Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide.  But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted thei...

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...

Lawrence Glickman, "Free Enterprise: An American History" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Free enterprise” is an everyday phrase that connotes an American common sense. It appears everywhere from political speeches to pop culture. And it is so central to the idea of the United States t...

Cynthia Baker, “Jew” (Rutgers UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the significance of Jew? How has this word come to have such varied and charged meanings? Who has (and has not) used it, and why? Cynthia Baker explores these questions and more in her new ...

Miranda Spieler, “Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana” (Harvard University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), historian Miranda Spieler tells of the transformation of a slave plantation colony into a destination for metr...

Jessica Whyte, "Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, in Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso), Jessica Whyte uncover...

Alexandra Minna Stern, "White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination" (Beacon Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, Dr. Alexandra Minna Stern and I discuss her latest book, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination (Beacon Press, 2019). Our conver...

Daniel B. Schwartz, “The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image” (Princeton UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benedito/Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1623-1677) lived at the crossroads of Dutch, scholastic, and Jewish worlds. Excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at 23, his works would later be p...

Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jackson, eds. “The Thinking Space” (Ashgate, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Believe it or not, the origins of this podcast and the entire New Books Network can be traced to a conversation I had in a cafein Ann Arbor, Michigan (Sweetwaters in Kerrytown, as it happens) in 20...

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...

Chiara Russo Krauss, "Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology: A Debate at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the start of the 19th century, the field we now call psychology was still the branch of philosophy that studied the soul. How did psychology come to define itself as a separate area of inquiry, ...

David Armitage, “Civil Wars: A History in Ideas” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Civil wars are among the most intractable conflicts in the world. Yet exactly distinguishes civil war from other types of armed struggle? In his book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Vintage Books, ...

Josef Stern, “The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides’ most famous work, The Guide of the Perplexed, has been interpreted variously as an attempt to reconcile reason and religion, as a guide to philosophers...

Iain Murray, "The Socialist Temptation" (Regnery Gateway, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Just thirty years ago, socialism seemed utterly discredited. An economic, moral, and political failure, socialism had rightly been thrown on the ash heap of history after the fall of the Berlin Wal...

Kate Kirkpatrick, "Becoming Beauvoir: A Life" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Kirkpatrick a lecturer in Religion, Philosophy and Culture at King’s College London and author of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Kirkpatrick has given us a biography th...

Bonny Ibhawoh, “Human Rights in Africa” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Bonny Ibhawoh examines the discourse of human rights in Africa. He challenges some of the dominant narratives that focus ...

Colette Colligan, “A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris 1890-1960” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Paris was a center for the publication of numerous English-language books, including many of a sexually explicit, pornogr...

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...

Anne M. Kornhauser, "Debating the American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan, 1930-1970" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The New Deal left a host of political, institutional, and economic legacies. Among them was the restructuring of the government into an administrative state with a powerful executive leader and a l...

Marshall Poe, “How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History of History” (Zero Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the history of a “history book”? In How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History Of History (Zero Books, 2018), Marshall Poe, founder and Editor-In-Chief of the New Books Network, tells t...

Timothy Shenk, “Maurice Dobb: Political Economist” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb is now largely forgotten. That’s too bad for a number of reasons. He was a brilliant thinker who wrote some of the most insightful analyses of the develop...

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 ...

Matthew Crow, "Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Matthew Crow about his book Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.  Crow studies how Jefferson’s associatio...

Jeffrey Stewart, “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Through his work as a scholar and critic, Alain Locke redefined African American culture and its place in American life. Jeffrey Stewart‘s book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford Univer...

Sarah Pessin, “Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neoplatonists, including the 11th century Jewish philosopher-poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol, are often saddled with a cosmology considered either as outdated science or a kind of “invisible floating Kans...

Marion Bower, "The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joan Riviere (1883-1962) is best known for her role in promoting the ideas of others. She came to prominence in the world of psychoanalysis as Freud’s favorite translator and Melanie Klein’s earlie...

Elizabeth S. Kassab, "Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The "Arab Spring" shook the world in 2011, revealing profound dissatisfaction throughout the Middle East and North Africa, as people throughout the region took to the streets demanding dramatic pol...

Shinshu Roberts, “Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji” (Wisdom Publications, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji (Wisdom Publications, 2018), Shinshu Roberts focuses on the practical study of the inner self and perception of all phe...

Nitzan Lebovic, “The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics” (Palgrave, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Mann referred to Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) as a “criminal philosopher,” a “Pan-Germanist,” “an irrationalist,” a “Tarzan philosopher,” “a cultural pessimist… the voice of the world’s downfal...

Richard G. Moore, "The Writings of Oliver Olney: April 1842 to February 1843-Nauvoo, Illinois" (Greg Kofford Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Oliver H. Olney, an early convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, fled to Nauvoo, Illinois, following persecution in Missouri. In Nauvoo, Olney became disgruntled with church le...

Charles King, "Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century" (Doubleday, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American anthropologists consider Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead to be foundational figures, but outside the academy few people know the details of their ideas. In this new volume, Ch...

Larry Wolff, “The Singing Turk” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford University Press, 2016), Larry Wolff takes us into that dist...

David N. Livingstone, “Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A report to the General Assembly of Scottish Presbyterians of 1923 contains the following passage: “God placed the people of this world in families, and history which is the narrative of His provid...

Crawford Gribben, "An Introduction to John Owen: A Christian Vision for Every Stage of Life" (Crossway, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though theology is often regarded as dealing primarily with abstract issues of belief, the prolific 17th-century English Puritan John Owen focused much of his attention on the role of Christian fai...

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

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

Seth Markle, “A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism 1964-1974” (Michigan State UP, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we talked to Seth Markle about his book, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism 1964-1974, published by Michigan State University Press in...

Robert J. Richards, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected...

Richard van Leeuwen, "The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction" (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the impressive volume of The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Brill), Richard van Leeuwen thoroughly examines an array of intricate ways in which the Thousand and One Night...

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

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

Alfred Ivry, “Maimonides’ ‘Guide of the Perplexed’: A Philosophical Guide” (University of Chicago, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alfred Ivry‘s book, Maimonides’ ‘Guide of the Perplexed’: A Philosophical Guide (University of Chicago, 2016) is the only modern commentary in English to explicate Maimonides’ summa The Guide of th...

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...

Charisse Burden-Stelly, "W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History" (ABC-CLIO, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why is the scholarship and advocacy work of W.E.B. Du Bois so relevant for 21st century politics? Does his unique combination of both serve as a possible template for today’s freedom movements? Dr....

Joseph M. Adelman, "Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the American Revolution, printed material, including newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and broadsides, played a crucial role as a forum for public debate. In Revolutionary Networks: The Busin...

Richard D. Brown, “Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard D. Brown’s new book Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017) offers a deft examination of the idea enshrined in the De...

Leora Batnitzky, “How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought” (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393