New Books in World Affairs Podcast

Border Lines: Refugees and the International Order from 2023-02-02T09:00

Climate change and war have flung millions of people on the move, who often seek safe harbor in the very countries responsible for their displacement. But despite the lofty ideals and supposed simp...

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On "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" from 2022-09-22T08:00

In 1948, the United Nations presented a document outlining human rights for every person in the world. This document was called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document has inspired...

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Susanna P. Campbell, "Global Governance and Local Peace: Accountability and Performance in International Peacebuilding" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do international peacebuilding organizations sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, even within the same country? Bridging the gaps between the peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and global governance...

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

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

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Jack Greene and Philip Morgan, “Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is the first in a series of podcasts that New Books in History is offering in conjunction with the National History Center. The NHC and Oxford University Press have initiated a book series cal...

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Sasha D. Pack, "The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between s...

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Susanna Forrest, “The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of humanity is intertwined with that of the horse to such a degree that it is no exaggeration to say that the existence of either species as we know it today is a product of its relatio...

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Lawrence Wittner, “Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement” (Stanford UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1983, when I was in college, I participated in something called a “Die-In.” A group of us set up crosses on the commons and threw ourselves on the ground as if we were dead. The idea, such as it...

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Jonathan D. T. Ward, "China's Vision of Victory" (Atlas Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Someday we may say that we never saw it coming. After seventy-five years of peace in the Pacific, a new challenger to American power has emerged, on a scale not seen since the Soviet Union at its h...

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Ronald A. Lindsay, “The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can’t Tell Us What to Do” (Pitchstone Publishing, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For the first time in human history, a significant percentage of the world’s population no longer believes in God. While its true that some societies are even seeing nonbelievers outnumber believer...

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

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

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Tobias Straumann, "1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can we learn from the financial crisis that brought Hitler to power? How did diplomatic deadlock fuel the rise of authoritarianism? Tobias Straumann shares vital insights with 1931: Debt, Cris...

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Leonard Grob and John Roth, “Losing Trust in the World: Holocaust Scholars Confront Torture,” (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every time I teach Comparative Genocide, I distribute a letter to the students preparing them for the particular challenges of taking a course about mass violence. In the letter, I point out a simp...

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Godfrey Hodgson, “The Myth of American Exceptionalism” (Yale UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How different is the United States from other nations? American leaders and common folk have often said it’s very different. The Founding Fathers said it, Abraham Lincoln said it, Woodrow Wilson sa...

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Tim Bouverie, "Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War" (Tim Duggan Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War(Tim Duggan Books, 2019) is a groundbreaking history of the disastrous years of indecision, failed diplomacy and parliamentary infight...

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Jorge Duany, “Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Not quite a colony, not quite independent, fiercely nationalist, what is Puerto Rico’s status, exactly? Jorge Duany‘s Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers...

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Gregory Cochran, “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” (Basic, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

First, the conventional wisdom. Because Homo sapiens are a young species and haven’t had time to genetically differentiate, we modern humans are all basically genetically identical. Because Homo sa...

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

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

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Rajan Gurukkal, “Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rajan Gurukkal‘s Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations (Oxford University Press, 2016) casts a critical eye over the exchanges, usuall...

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Carl Bon Tempo, “Americans at the Gates: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War” (Princeton UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

My Midwestern high school was pretty typical. There were freaks, geeks, jocks, drama-types. Some were white. And some were black. All were recognizably “American.” The only unusual thing about Wich...

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Jennifer Hubbert, "China in the World: An Anthropology of Confucius Institutes, Soft Power, and Globalization" (U Hawaii Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent years, Confucius Institutes—cultural and language programs funded by the Chinese government—have garnered attention in the United States due to a debate over whether they threaten free sp...

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Or Rosenboim, “The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The world order was in crisis at mid-century. Intellectuals in England and the United States perceived the rise of totalitarianism, the Second World War, the invention of the atomic bomb, the start...

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Ian McNeely, “Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet” (Norton, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We don’t think much about institutions. They just seem to “be there.” But they have a history, as Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton show in their important new book Reinventing Knowledge. From Alexa...

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Kristen R. Ghodsee, "Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Last week, I had the privilege to talk with Dr. Kristen R. Ghodsee about her most recent book Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke Un...

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

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

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Walter Moss, “An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth Century Global Forces” (Anthem Press, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I’m very pleased to have Professor Walter Moss of Eastern Michigan University on the program. Walt and I have known each others for years, and I’ve long admired him. Walt is best known for hi...

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Stacy Fahrenthold, "Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her debut book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Stacy Fahrenthold sheds a timely light o...

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Michael Bryant,” A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the Present,” (Bloomsbury, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Bryant’s book is both less and more ambitious than its title. He’s writing less of a history of war crimes than he is a history of the idea and concept of war crimes. He’s most interested i...

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Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus o...

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Jonathan Fennell, "Fighting the People's War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Fennell’s new book, Fighting the People's War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is an unprecedented, panoramic history of the...

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Paul Hollander, “From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s true that Western “intellectuals” have not always been wrong about dictators fighting for a supposedly “brighter future,” usually (though not always) of the non-capitalist variety. Nonetheless...

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Heidi Tworek, "News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In our current moment marred by media monopolies and disinformation campaigns, it is easy to get caught up in the dizzying temporality of the news cycle and think these are new phenomena. Heidi Two...

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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...

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Mark Peterson, "The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban...

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Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amit Prasad is widely admired for using Postcolonial Studies to explore questions about science, technology and medicine. In Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United Sta...

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Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace" (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killi...

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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...

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

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

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Phil Gurski, “Western Foreign Fighters: The Threat to Homeland and International Security” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Phil Gurski‘s Western Foreign Fighters: The Threat to Homeland and International Security (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) is his second recent monograph on terrorism, and another useful resource for...

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

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

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Robert Jervis, “How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Jervis is the author of How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2017). Jervis is the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics...

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Bonita Mersiades, "Whatever It Takes: The Inside Story of the FIFA Way" (Powderhouse Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Bonita Mersiades, former Head of Public Affairs with the Football Federation Australia, and author of Whatever It Takes: The Inside Story of the FIFA Way (Powderhouse Press, ...

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Tony Collins, “The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby” (Bloomsbury, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 2017 Six Nations rugby tournament concluded this weekend. England successfully defended its championship, despite losing the last match against a strong Ireland side in Dublin–England’s only lo...

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Brian A. Jackson, "Practical Terrorism Prevention" (RAND Corporation, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Practical Terrorism Prevention: Reexamining U.S. National Approaches to Addressing the Threat of Ideologically Motivated Violence (RAND Corporation, 2019), examines past countering-violent-extremis...

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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...

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

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

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Phoebe Chow, “Britain’s Imperial Retreat from China, 1900-1931” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the start of the twentieth century Britain’s relationship with China was defined by the economic and political dominance Britain exerted in the country as an imperial power, a dominance that wou...

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James Miller, "Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World" (FSG, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea from Ancient Athens to Our World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), James Miller encapsulates 2500 years of democracy history into ...

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David F. Lancy, “The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Developmental psychology seems to tell us how to best to raise our children into competent and decent adults. However, comparing our theories and practices to those of other cultures raises questio...

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John Pat Leary, "Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism" (Haymarket Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Pat Leary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2019) chronicles the rise of a new vocabulary in the twenty-first century. From Silicon Valley to the White House, from k...

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Brian T. Edwards, “After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American culture is ubiquitous across the globe. It travels to different social contexts and is consumed by international populations. But the relationship between American culture and the meanings...

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James Crossland, "War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853-1914" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beginning in the mid-1850s, a number of people in Europe and the United States undertook a range of efforts in response to the horrors of war. In his book War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Con...

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Ryan Muldoon, “Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea that a political order derives its authority, legitimacy, and justification from some kind of initial agreement or contract, whether hypothetical or tacit, has been a mainstay of political...

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

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

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Raphael Dalleo, “American Imperialisms Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anti-colonialism” (UVa Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As Raphael Dalleo demonstrates in his wide-ranging and compelling American Imperialism Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anti-colonialism (University of Virginia Press, 2016...

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Jeremy Black, "War and its Causes" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter, is well-known as one of the most prolific of publishing historians. His latest book, War and its Causes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), returns to a subj...

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Iza Hussin, “The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her fascinating new book The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Iza Hussin, Lecturer of Politics a...

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Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, "How Democracies Die" (Crown, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Ziblatt has done a lot of interviews since the release of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018) the bestselling book he co-wrote with Steven Levitsky. But we asked him a question he’d never gott...

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Laura Madokoro, “Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Laura Madokoro’s new book is a timely and important study of movement across national borders, migrants, and the refugee label in the global Cold War. Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold W...

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Martin Collins, "A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s easy to take for granted that one can pick up a cell phone and call someone on the other side of the planet. But, until very recently, this had been a mere dream. Martin Collins’ A Telephone f...

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Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Terry Nichols Clark, “The Third Sector: Community Organizations, NGOs, and Nonprofits” (U. Illinois Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Terry Nichols Clark are the authors of The Third Sector: Community Organizations, NGOs, and Nonprofits (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Kallman is a postdoctoral r...

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F. Grillo and R. Nanetti, "Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I spoke with Francesco Grillo (co-authored with Raffaella Nanetti) about his latest book, Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy (Palgrave Macmillan,...

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Richard Jean So, “Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network” (Columbia University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Jean So’s new book studies a group of American and Chinese writers in the three decades after WWI to propose a conceptual framework for understanding intellectual and cultural relations bet...

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Jeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, ...

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

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

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

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

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Chris Miller, “The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy” (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most interesting questions of modern history is this: Why is it that Communist China was able to make a successful transition to economic modernity (and with it prosperity) while the Com...

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Kimberly Chong, "Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do management consultants do, and how do they do it? These two deceptively simple questions are at the centre of Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in Chin...

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“Best New Books in Political Science 2016: International Politics Edition” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Last week featured a year-end-round up of books in American politics. This week I looked back to the past year on the podcast in other subfields. I start with an interview I enjoyed with Prerna Sin...

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Max Edelson, "The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence" (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we think of the history of the British empire we tend to think big: oceans were crossed; colonies grew from small settlements to territories many times larger than England; entire Continents, ...

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Marc Sageman, “Misunderstanding Terrorism” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Misunderstanding Terrorism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Marc Sageman provides an important reassessment of the global neojihadi threat to the West. He argues that inaccurate evaluati...

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Henry Kissinger and Winston Lord, "Kissinger on Kissinger: Reflections on Diplomacy, Grand Strategy, and Leadership" (All Points Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a series of riveting and in depth interviews, America's senior statesman, former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, discusses the challenges of directing foreign policy during times of great g...

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

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

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David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are living in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and binge eating to pornography and opioid abuse. Today I talked with historian David Courtwright about the global nature of pleasure, v...

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Coll Thrush, “Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of...

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Lindsey N. Kingston, "Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lindsey N. Kingston’s new book, Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2019) interrogates the idea of citizenship itself, what it means, how it works, how it is ...

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

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

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Michael A. Cohen, "Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are fed a steady stream of doom and gloom—terrorist attacks, erosion of democracy, robots taking our jobs. But Michael A. Cohen and his co-author Mich Zenko argue in Clear and Present Safety: Th...

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Carrie Booth Walling, “All Necessary Measures: The United Nations and Humanitarian Intervention” (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why does the UN intervene in some cases of mass violence and not others? Why and how have public attitudes toward humanitarian intervention changed over the past decades? And how do the stories we ...

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Jeremy Black, "Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World" (Encounter Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are you tired of the constant refrain from our campus radicals and their bien-pensant allies in the intelligentsia that the United States and the United Kingdom, AKA the American and the British em...

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Patrick Wolfe, “Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race” (Verso, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Widely known for his pioneering work in the field of settler colonial studies, Patrick Wolfe advanced the theory that settler colonialism was, “a structure, not an event.” In early 2016, Wolfe deep...

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Mollie Gerver, "The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation" (U Edinburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Moral and political theorists have paid a healthy amount of attention to states’ rights to determine who may reside within their territory. Accordingly, there’s a large literature on immigration, ...

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Sally Engle Merry, “The Seduction of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Quantification is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when hearing or reading about the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (OHCHR). Yet in the 21st century, a wide range of p...

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Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about the Anthropocene ...

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Robert Peckham, “Epidemics in Modern Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Peckham’s Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores the crucial yet under-explored role that epidemics have played in both colonial and postcolonial Asia. At once ...

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

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

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Charlotte Mathieson, ed. “Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present” (Palgrave, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the relationship between the sea and culture? In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present (Palgrave, 2016) , Charlotte Mathieson, a lecturer in English Literature at the ...

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

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

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Jessamyn R. Abel, “The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933-1964” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessamyn R. Abel’s new book carefully traces the rise and transformations of an internationalist worldview in modern Japan, from its withdrawal from the League of Nations and admission into the UN,...

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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...

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Nile Green, “Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The historical convergence of European imperialism and technological innovation in communication and travel made multiple social sites of intersection between the local and global possible. Nile Gr...

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

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

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Michael David-Fox, “Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union” (U Pittsburgh Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s been a quarter century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This anniversary marks a good occasion to ask a seemingly simple question: “What was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?” Wa...

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Federico Varese, "Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories" (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tonight we are talking with Federico Varese about his new book Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories (Princeton University Press, 2011). Whenever you read a book about tr...

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John Prados, “Storm Over Leyte: The Philippine Invasion and the Destruction of the Japanese Navy” (NAL, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Narratives of the Pacific War frequently examine the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf from the operational perspective, focusing on the desperate actions of the US Seventh Fleets escort carriers, Task Uni...

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

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

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Elizabeth Reich, “Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema” (Rutgers UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth Reich is an assistant professor of film studies at Connecticut College in New London. Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema (Rutger...

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

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

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Carina E. Ray, “Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana” (Ohio UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2015), Carina E. Ray interrogates the intersections of race, marriage, gender and e...

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

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

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James Waller, “Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today is the third of our occasional series on the question of how to respond to mass atrocities. Earlier this summer I talked with Scott Straus and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Later in September I’ll t...

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Kevin T. Smiley, "Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Future" (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are market cities better than people cities? Does the satisfaction that residents take in their city vary from market city to people city? In Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Fu...

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Jade Doskow, “Lost Utopias” (Black Dog Publishing, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since 2007, American photographer Jade Doskow has been documenting the remains of World’s Fair sites, once iconic global attractions that have often been repurposed for less noble aspirations or ne...

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Kathleen Burk, "The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires, 1783-1972" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Throughout modern history, British and American rivalry has gone hand in hand with common interests. Now renown diplomatic historian Professor Kathleen Burk in her newest book, The Lion and the Eag...

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Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “America Abroad: The United States’ Role in the 21st Century” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A decade and a half of exhausting wars, punishing economic setbacks, and fast-rising rivals has called into question America’s fundamental position and purpose in world politics. Will the US contin...

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Deborah E. Lipstadt, "Antisemitism: Here and Now" (Schocken, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over the past decade, and especially in the last several years, anti-Semitic crimes have increased significantly. According to FBI Statistics, hate crimes against Jews in the US spiked 37% between ...

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Isabelle Hesse, “The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, ...

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Tom Wheeler, "From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future" (Brookings, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It's easy to get sidetracked while writing a book. But imagine being interrupted by the President of the United States. That happened to Tom Wheeler, who was in the midst of writing a history of co...

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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...

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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...

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Neil Kent, “Crimea: A History” (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the...

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Nico Slate, "Lord Cornwallis is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the twenty-first century, India and the United States are two closely connected states. Some of this is economic, and with it comes a concern that jobs in the United States are being outsourced ...

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Marc-William Palen, “The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Ang...

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Kate Ervine, "Carbon" (Polity, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The crisis of global warming overwhelms the imagination with its urgency, yet more than ever we need patient, clear-sighted. and careful assessments of the possibilities for transforming the global...

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Jean Chalaby, “The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution” (Polity, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Television had been transformed by the rise of the format. In The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution Jean Chalaby, Professor of International Communication at City University London,...

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Natalie Koch, "Critical Geographies of Sport: Space, Power, and Sport in Global Perspective" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Natalie Koch, Associate Professor of Geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and editor of Critical Geographies of Sport: Sp...

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Bridget Conley-Zilkic, ed. “How Mass Atrocities End: Studies from Guatemala, Burundi, Indonesia, the Sudans, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you want to know how to bring future mass atrocities to an end, the best place to start is to examine how past mass atrocities have ended. This simple piece of logic is at the heart of Bridget ...

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Daniel Immerwahr, "How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States" (FSG, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, however, people use empire simply because the United S...

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Jules Boykoff, “Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics” (Verso, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the birth of the modern Olympics movement in the late nineteenth century, its leaders have attempted to maintain a strict separation of athletics and politics. Former International Olympic Co...

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Scott Mobley, "Progressives in Navy Blue: Maritime Strategy, American Empire, and the Transformation of U.S. Naval Identity, 1873-1898" (Naval Institute Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This episode of the New Books in Military History podcast is something of a sea change, so to speak, as we turn our attention to naval policy and strategy. Institutional reform is a well-establish...

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Dov Waxman, “Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel (Princeton University Press, 2016), Dov Waxman, professor of political science, international affairs, and Israel studies at Northe...

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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...

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Rachel Price, “Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture and the Future of the Island” (Verso, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cuban artists have been very productive this past decade, producing stunning and surprising works against a backdrop of political and economic transformation as well as continuing scarcity on the i...

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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...

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Scott Straus, “Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention” (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This podcast is the first of a new occasional series of interviews addressing the question of responding to mass atrocities and genocide. Later in the summer I’ll interview Bridget Conley-Zilkic, J...

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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 ...

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

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

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Alfredo Toro Hardy, "The Crossroads of Globalization. A Latin American View" (World Scientific Publishing. 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Crossroads of Globalization. A Latin American View (World Scientific Publishing Co. 2019) explores the complex interaction of several forces shaping the current world economic situation. Alfred...

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William Blum, “America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy – the Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else” (Zed Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since World War II, the United States has repeatedly posited itself as a defender of democracy, using its military might to promote freedom abroad even as it ascended to the status of the world’s o...

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Janne Lahti, "The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the enduring questions in American historiography is: just where exactly is the West? In The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2019), Dr. Ja...

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Susan Turner Haynes, “Chinese Nuclear Proliferation: How Global Politics is Transforming China’s Weapons Buildup and Modernization” (Potomac Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While the world’s attention is focused on the nuclearization of North Korea and Iran and the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, China is believed to have doubled the size of its nucle...

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Nicholas Breyfogle, "Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russia and Soviet History" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas Breyfogle, Associate Professor at the Ohio State University, had produced a new edited volume, Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russia and Soviet History (University o...

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Elizabeth Hurd, “Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Among the most frequent demands made of Islam and Muslims today is to become more moderate. But what counts as moderate and who will decide so are questions with less than obvious answers. In her t...

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Fred S. Naiden, "Soldier, Priest, and God: A Life of Alexander the Great" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Macedonian king Alexander III is best remembered today for his many martial accomplishments and the empire he built from them. Yet as Fred S. Naiden details in Soldier, Priest, and God: A Life ...

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

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

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Danyel Reiche, "Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games" (Routedge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Danyel Reiche, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the American University of Beirut, and the author of Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games (Rout...

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Gregory F. Domber, “Empowering Revolution: America, Poland, and the End of the Cold War” (U. of North Carolina Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As the most populous country in Eastern Europe as well as the birthplace of the largest anticommunist dissident movement, Poland is crucial in understanding the end of the Cold War. During the 1980...

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Matthew Longo, "The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Matthew Longo takes the reader on an unusual journey, at least within political theory, since his work combines a normative political theory approach with an ethnographic approach ...

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Marc Lynch, “The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East” (PublicAffairs, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marc Lynch is the author of The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2016). Lynch is a professor of political science at George Washington University and blogs a...

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Peter Hopsicker and Mark Dyreson, "A Half Century of Super Bowls: National and Global Perspectives on America's Grandest Spectacle" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Super Bowl is a singular spectacle in American culture. More than just a championship football game, the Super Bowl has become an unparalleled display of nationalism, consumerism, and culture. ...

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Charles Keith, “Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation” (U of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The relationship between religion, imperialism, and national identity can be quite complex. At the same time, nationalist readings of history, particularly when they are combined with other ideolog...

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Brannon D. Ingram, "Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (University of California Press, 2018) by Brannon D. Ingram is a timely study of the Deoband movement from its inception in India to its tr...

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Cass Sunstein, “The World According to Star Wars” (Harper Collins, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cass Sunstein‘s son, Declan, got dad hooked on Star Wars. And dad, a Harvard Law professor, ended up writing a book about it. “If you’d told me a year ago that I’d write a book about Star Wars,” Su...

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John Torpey, "The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental" (Rutgers UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since its initial postulation by Karl Jaspers, the concept of an “axial age” in the development of human thought and religion has exerted enormous influence in the fields of history and sociology. ...

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Rajika Bhandari and Mirka Martel, “Social Justice and Sustainable Change: The Impacts of Higher Education” (IIE, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rajika Bhandari, Deputy Vice President, Research and Evaluation Institute of International Education (IIE), and Mirka Martel, Assistant Director of Research and Evaluation at IIE, join New Books in...

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

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

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Ho-fung Hung, “The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ho-fung Hung‘s new book has two main goals: to to outline the historical origins of Chinas capitalist boom and the social and political formations in the 1980s that gave rise to this boom, and to e...

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Noah Coburn, "Under Contract: The Invisible Workers of America's Global War" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Noah Coburn's Under Contract: The Invisible Workers of America's Global War (Stanford University Press, 2018) is about the hidden workers of American’s foreign wars: third country nationals who whi...

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Amy Randall, “Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Any time I prepare to do an interview, I make sure I read the blurb on the back of the book. One of the blurbs on the back cover of Amy Randall’s superb new collection Genocide and Gender in the Tw...

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

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

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Malcolm James, “Urban Multiculture: Youth, Politics and Transformations in a Global City” (Palgrave, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How is youth culture changing in a globalised city? In Urban Multiculture: Youth, Politics and Transformations in a Global City Malcolm James, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, introduces the...

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Chinmay Tumbe, "Moving India: A History of Migration" (Penguin/Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chinmay Tumbe's book Moving India: A History of Migration (Penguin/Viking, 2018) is a brilliant and path-breaking history of Migration in India. Tumbe analyses the interlinked histories of migratio...

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Brooke Schedneck, “Thailand’s International Meditation Centers” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her recent monograph, Thailand’s International Meditation Centers: Tourism and the Global Commodification of Religious Practices (Routledge, 2015), Brooke Schedneck examines Buddhist meditation ...

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Rodrigo Zeidan, "Economics of Global Business" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I spoke with Professor Rodrigo Zeidan of New York University, Shanghai. He has just published Economics of Global Business (MIT Press, 2018), a great book with innovative real-world macroeconomic a...

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Lincoln A. Mitchell, “The Democracy Promotion Paradox” (Brookings Institution Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In book his new book The Democracy Promotion Paradox (Brookings Institution Press, 2015), Lincoln A. Mitchell (Political Correspondent for the New York Observer) raises difficult but critically imp...

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Jonathan Fulton, "China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Fulton's China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies (Routledge, 2018) sheds light on China’s increasing economic role at a moment that the traditionally dominant role in international oil ...

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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 ...

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Van Jackson, "On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and The Threat of Nuclear War" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and The Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Van Jackson succinctly explains the major issues facing U.S.-North Korea relations since ...

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Asma Afsaruddin, “Contemporary Issues in Islam” (Edinburgh UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As the title of the monograph suggests, Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) by Asma Afsaruddin, guides the reader through an organized and compelling narrative of reflec...

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Anne Gerritsen, "The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We think of blue and white porcelain as the ultimate global commodity: throughout East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean including the African coasts, the Americas and Europe, consumers desired ...

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Derek Hird and Geng Song, "The Cosmopolitan Dream: Transnational Chinese Masculinities in a Global Age" (Hong Kong UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China’s global rise has been analysed from many perspectives in recent years. But pressing questions over how understandings of gender – and particularly masculinity – have been changing amidst inc...

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Linsey McGoey, “No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy” (Verso, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (Verso Books, 2015), Linsey McGoey proposes a new way of discussing philanthropy and, in doing so, revives associ...

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Sujit Sivasundaram, "Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire" (William Collins, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (William Collins, 2020), Sujit Sivasundaram brings together far-flung archives across the world and the best new academic research....

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

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

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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...

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Daniel Deudney, "Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. The Trump Administration has created a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expens...

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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 ...

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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...

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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 ...

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Michele Gelfand, "Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World" (Scribner Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World(Scribner Books, 2018), Dr. Michele Gelfand leverages cultural psychology research to examine social norms and their implic...

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Thomas G. Weiss, “Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action” (Polity Press, 2016 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect changing in the current international political scene? In Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (3rd ed., Polity Press, 2016...

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Ian Foster, "Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas" (UP of Mississippi, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas (UP of Mississippi, 2019) author Christopher Ian Foster analyzes increasingly urgent q...

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Judith Eve Lipton and David P. Barash, "Strength through Peace: How Demilitarization Led to Peace and Happiness in Costa Rica" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Costa Rica is the only full-fledged and totally independent country to be entirely demilitarized. Its military was abolished in 1948, with the keys to the armory handed to the Department of Educati...

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Marlene Daut, “Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865” (Liverpool UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marlene Daut tackles the complicated intersection of history and literary legacy in her book Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-18...

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Andrew Liu, "Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After water, tea is the most widely consumed drink in the world. It is beloved by consumers in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and it comes in a bewildering array of varieties: from the che...

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

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

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Katerina Bodovski, “Across Three Continents: Reflections on Immigration, Education, and Personal Survival” (Peter Lang, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Katerina Bodovski, Associate Professor of Education, Department of Education Policy Studies, College of Education, Penn State University, joins New Books in Education to discuss her new and ver...

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K. A. Lieber and D. G. Press, "The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age (Cornell University Press, 2020), Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press tackle the central puzzle of the nuclear age: the persist...

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Anne Reinhardt, "Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937" (Harvard U Asia Center, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At a time when trade between China and the outside world is rarely out of the news, it remains important to remember that in centuries past global commerce moved in directions very different from t...

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Timothy Nunan, “Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The plight of Afghanistan remains as relevant a question as ever in 2016. Just what did the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the international occupation of this country accomplish? Will an Afghan ...

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

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

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Jonathan Fulton and Li-Chen Sim, "External Powers and the Gulf Monarchies" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Fulton and Li-Chen Sim’s edited volume, External Powers and the Gulf Monarchies(Routledge, 2018) is a timely contribution to understanding the increasingly diversified relations between th...

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Roshanak Kheshti, “Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music” (NYU Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The origins of world music can be found in early ethnographic recordings as anthropologists and ethnomusicologists sought to record the songs of lost or dying cultures. In Modernity’s Ear: Listenin...

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Ian Buruma, "The Churchill Complex" (Penguin Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From one of its keenest observers, The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit (Penguin Press) is a brilliant, witty journey through the "Special Rel...

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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...

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Jeff Koehler, “Darjeeling” (Bloomsbury, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Darjeeling tea, like other members of its artisanal tribe serrano peppers, Champagne, and grana padano,exists through a combination of intimate understanding of natural forces, intensive labor, and...

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Robert Zoellick, "America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy" (Twelve, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ranging from Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and James Baker, America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy (Tw...

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John B. Judis, "The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization" (Columbia Global Reports, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Donald Trump in the United States, Brexit vote in the U.K., various anti-EU parties in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, as well as nativist or authoritarian le...

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Peter Linebaugh, “The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day” (PM Press, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day (PM Press, 2007) is a new collection of essays from Peter Linebaugh about the history of May Day. The essays were written for a rang...

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Hayden J. Bellenoit, "The Formation of the Colonial State in India: Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760-1860" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When he appeared before the British House of Commons in the wake of the Stamp Act crisis, Benjamin Franklin reminded his audience that the American colonies were governed ‘at the expense only of a ...

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Ayça Çubukçu, "For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Harkening back to the tribunal on Vietnam once convened by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged in 2003 from the global antiwar movement that had mobilize...

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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...

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Philip Jenkins, "Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions" (Baylor UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions (Baylor University Press, 2020), Philip Jenkins maps the demographic revolution that has ta...

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K. Fullagar and M. A. McDonnell, "Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Fullagar's and Michael A. McDonnell's edited volume Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) reimagines the Age of Revolution from the...

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Jonathan Donner, “After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thanks to mobile phones, getting online is easier and cheaper than ever. In After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet (MIT Press, 2015), Jonathan Donner challenges the optimi...

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

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

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Jinping Wang, "In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making of a New Social Order in North China 1200-1600" (Harvard Asia Center, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On the background of widespread portrayals of China as a monolithic geographical and political entity moving through time, insights into the endlessly contingent, local and contested events which h...

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Leif Wenar, “Blood Oil: Tyranny, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chances are that at this very moment, you are either looking at a computer screen, holding a digital device, or listening to my voice through plastic earphones. Our computers and these other device...

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Michael E. McCullough, "The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why Give a Damn About Strangers? In his book The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code (Basic Books, 2020), Michael E. McCullough explains. McCullough is a professor of...

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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...

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Naomi Klein, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate” (Simon and Schuster, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Canadian author and journalist Naomi Klein says right-wing conservatives who deny the reality of global warming are correct about the revolutionary implications of climate change. In her new b...

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Philip Cunliffe, "The New Twenty Years' Crisis: A Critique of International Relations, 1999-2019" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the end of the 20th century, the liberal international order appeared unassailable after its triumph over the authoritarian challenges of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Twenty years later, howe...

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Andrew Roberts, "Churchill: Walking With Destiny" (Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For all of the books written about Winston Churchill, much remains to be said about his extensive life and career. In Churchill: Walking With Destiny(Viking, 2018), Andrew Roberts takes advantage o...

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

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

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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...

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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...

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Caroline Shaw, “Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Published in October 2015, Caroline Shaw‘s timely new book, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford University Press, 2015), traces the intert...

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Chinua Thelwell, "Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) by Dr. Chinua Thelwell is a rich, well-researched, and sobering investigation of blackface minstrel...

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Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland, "Urgency in the Anthropocene" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene(MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global...

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

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

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Alan Chong, "Critical Reflections on China’s Belt and Road Initiative" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Political scientists Alan Chong and Quang Min Pham bring with their edited volume, Critical Reflections on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), originality as well as dimens...

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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...

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William C. Smith, ed., “The Global Testing Culture: Shaping Education Policy, Perceptions, and Practice” (Symposium Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

William C. Smith (ed.), senior associate with RESULTS Educational Fund, joins New Books in Education to discuss The Global Testing Culture: Shaping Education Policy, Perceptions, and Practice (Symp...

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Barbara Keys, "The Ideal of Global Sport: From Peace to Human Rights" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Barbara Keys, Professor of US and International History at Durham University, and author and editor of The Ideal of Global Sport: From Peace to Human Rights (University of Pe...

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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...

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John Casey, “The Nonprofit World: Civil Society and the Rise of the Nonprofit Sector” (Kumarian Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The nonprofit sector is growing, not just in the United States, but globally. In The Nonprofit World: Civil Society and the Rise of the Nonprofit Sector (Kumarian Press, 2015), John Casey demonstra...

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Joan Scott, "On the Judgment of History" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joan Scott’s groundbreaking work in gender and French history is essential reading for any aspiring historian. Indeed, she last joined us on New Books in French Studies to talk about her 2017 book ...

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Sandra Fahy, “Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea” (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amidst an atmosphere of hope on the Korean Peninsula over the past year, questions over the wellbeing of North Korea’s population have again come to global attention. But this is far from the first...

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Francesca Bray et al.,eds., “Rice: Global Networks and New Histories” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The new edited volume by Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black and Dagmar Schafer is a wonderfully interdisciplinary global history of rice, rooted in specific local cases, that spans 1...

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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...

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Zoe Knox, “Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Secular World: From the 1870s to the Present” (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jehovah’s Witnesses are one of the most successful “new religious movements” to have emerged from the prophetic ferment within later nineteenth-century Protestantism. Always controversial, often pe...

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Saba Mahmood, “Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is commonly thought that violence, injustice, and discrimination against religious minorities, especially in the Middle East, are a product of religious fundamentalism and myopia. Concomitantly,...

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Christopher Capozzola, "Bound By War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ever since American troops occupied the Philippines in 1898, generations of Filipinos have served in and alongside the U.S. armed forces. In Bound By War: How the United States and the Philippines ...

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Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States” (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From Dancing with the Stars to the high-profile airport abandonment of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev by his American adoptive parents in April 2010, popular representations of post-Soviet immigran...

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Anna L. Tsing, “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anna L. Tsing‘s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-No...

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Ravinder Kaur, "Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in 21st-Century India" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is 21st century commonsense that India is an “emerging” economy. But how did this common sense itself emerge? How did India’s global image shift from that of a poverty-infested Third World count...

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

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

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Stephen Macekura, “Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today, sustainability is all the rage. But when and why did the idea of sustainable development emerge, and how has its meaning changed over time? Stephen Macekura’s new book, Of Limits and Growth...

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

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

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

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

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Jason W. Moore, “Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital” (Verso, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), author Jason W. Moore seeks to undermine popular understandings of the relationship among society, environme...

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Serena Parekh, "No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Discourse in wealthy Western countries about refugees tends to follow a familiar script. How many refugees is a country morally required to accept? What kinds of care and support are host countries...

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Ching Kwan Lee, “The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investmen...

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Marjorie Feld, “Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Marjorie Feld, associate professor of history at Babson College, explores the tension between the parti...

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E. A. Alpers and C. Goswami, "Transregional Trade and Traders" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Blessed with numerous safe harbors, accessible ports, and a rich hinterland, Gujarat has been central to the history of Indian Ocean maritime exchange that involved not only goods, but also people ...

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Patricia Lorcin and Todd Shepard, “French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories” (U Nebraska Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Following a 2011 meeting of the annual Mediterranean Workshop at the University of Minnesota, Patricia Lorcin (a co-convener) approached Todd Shepard (one of the workshop participants that year) ab...

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Anthony Reid, “A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads” (Wiley Blackwell, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To write a comprehensive history of Southeast Asia is a task reserved for precious few scholars: historians of unrivaled skill and formidable knowledge. Anthony Reid is among them. His new book, A ...

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

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

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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...

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Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty” (U of Minnesota Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Owning property. Being property. Becoming propertyless. These are three themes of white possession that structure Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s brilliant new inquiry into the dynamics of race and Indig...

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Lorenz M. Lüthi, "Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Standard narratives focus on Soviet-American rivalry as if the superpowers were the exclusive driving f...

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Gill Bennett, “The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still resonates nearly one-hundred years after it was wr...

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Conference Report: Genocide In World History, Bryant University, 9-10 October 2015 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s podcast marks the beginning of what I hope might become a regular feature on the podcast. The session was recorded live on the campus of Bryant University at the end of weekend conference w...

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S. Lawreniuk and L. Parsons, "Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality (Oxford UP, 2020) brings together more than a decade’s worth of research during one of the most consequential moments in Cambodian ...

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Martin Saxer and Juan Zhang, eds., “The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China’s Borders” (Amsterdam UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China’s growing presence in all of our worlds today is felt most keenly by those living directly on the country’s borders. They, together with the Chinese people who also inhabit the borderlands, a...

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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...

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

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

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Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, “What Slaveholders Think: How Contemporary Perpetrators Rationalize what They Do” (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to the Walk Free Foundation, there are currently 46 million slaves in the world. Despite being against international law, slavery is not yet culturally condemned everywhere. Despite being...

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

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

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

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

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Jennifer Yusin, “The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition” (Fordham UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does postcolonial theory and the work of Freud help us understand trauma? In The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition (Fordham University Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Yusin, Ass...

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Eric Tagliacozzo, et al., “Asia Inside Out: Connected Places” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Tagliacozzo, Peter C. Perdue, and Helen F. Siu‘s “Asia Inside Out” project is a model for interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship in all kinds of ways. Planned as a trilogy, the first ...

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Thea Riofrancos, "Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2007, Ecuador joined the Latin American “Pink Tide” by electing a left-wing president, Rafael Correa, who voiced opposition to US imperialism and advocated higher levels of redistribution and so...

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Susan Carruthers, “The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016), Dr. Susan Carruthers, professor of American Studies at the University of Warwick, ...

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Jenny Shaw, “Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference” (U of Georgia Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jenny Shaw‘s recent book Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (University of Georgia Press, 2013) analyzes how social, religious, and et...

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

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

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Bradley W. Hart, “Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018), Bradley W. Hart, assistant professor at California State University, Fresno...

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Neha Vora, “Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neha Vora‘s Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) is a wonderfully rich and engaging account of middle class Indians who live and work, supposedly temporarily, ...

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C. De Beukelaer and K. M. Spence, "Global Cultural Economy" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How should we understand the role of cultural industries in contemporary society? In Global Cultural Economy (Routledge) Christiaan De Beukelaer, a senior lecturer in cultural policy at the Univers...

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Jeffrey D. Sachs, “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you are tired of reading the same, Washington-based, consensus, ‘realist’ and or ‘neo-conservative’, critiques of American foreign policy, here is something to salivate on: Jeffrey D. Sachs’, A ...

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Suzanna Reiss, “We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of U.S. Empire” (University of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though the conventional history of the U.S.-led “War on Drugs” locates the origins of this conflict in a reaction to the domestic culture of excess of the 1960s, a new book argues that internationa...

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Adam Hanieh, "Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When most Westerners think of the Gulf, the first thing that comes to mind is often oil. However, as Adam Hanieh demonstrates in Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the...

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Elizabeth McGuire, “Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If Sino-Russian relations today sometimes seem bluntly pragmatic, things were not always so, and as imperial dynasties in both countries crumbled one hundred years ago many interactions between the...

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Phil Tiermeyer, “Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants” (U of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s guest discusses the history of sexuality in the workplace through the lens of male flight attendants. We speak with Phil Tiemeyer about the shifts and changes in the airline industry across...

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Nicole Hassoun, "Global Health Impact: Expanding Access to Essential Medicines" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every year nine million people are diagnosed with tuberculosis, every day over 13,400 people are infected with AIDs, and every thirty seconds malaria kills a child. For most of the world, critical ...

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Thomas Schmidinger, “Rojava: Revolution, War and the Future of Syria’s Kurds” (Pluto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Schmidinger‘s Rojava: Revolution, War and the Future of Syria’s Kurds (Pluto Press, 2018) is an exploration of the history and present of Syrian Kurdistan. It is an excellent introduction to...

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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...

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John Barton, "A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book" (Viking, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Barton is no stranger to Holy Scripture. Having spent much of his academic career as a chaplain and professor of theology at the University of Oxford, his latest book is an attempt to shed lig...

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Paul Bjerk, “Julius Nyerere” (Ohio University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Bjerk’s compact biography Julius Nyerere, published as part of the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series follows closely on the heels of his monograph on the same subject – Building a Peaceful...

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Carolyn Pedwell, “Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What are the multiple meanings, ambivalences, possible risks, and potentials for transformation that arise from interrogating empathy on a transnational scale? Carolyn Pedwell (University of Kent) ...

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

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

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Joel R. Pruce, “The Mass Appeal of Human Rights” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can human rights campaigns function in consumer and celebrity society? In The Mass Appeal of Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Joel Pruce, assistant professor in political science at the...

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Nicole Starosielski, “The Undersea Network” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicole Starosielski‘s new book brings an environmental and ecological consciousness to the study of digital media and digital systems, and it is a must-read. The Undersea Network (Duke University P...

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Oumar Ba, "States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020) theorizes the ways in which states that are presumed to be weaker in the international system ...

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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 ...

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Tom Jackson, “Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again” (Bloomsbury, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tom Jackson‘s Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again (Bloomsbury, 2015) is a completely engrossing look into the history and technology of refrigeration. This book read...

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Bjorn Lomborg, "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Should climate change policy be subject to a cost-benefit analysis leading to a variety of policy choices? Or is it so critical that the only "proper" path is immediate and extreme carbon reduction...

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Brian Stanley, “Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked with Brian Stanley, professor of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, about his new book, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton University P...

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Paul A. Christensen, “Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo” (Lexington Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul A. Christensen‘s new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. Focusing on two major alcohol sobriety support groups in Japan, Alco...

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Renisa Mawani, "Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Renisa Mawani’s Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Duke University Press), take us to 1914, when the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata...

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Megan Black, “The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Of all of the departments of the U.S. government you might expect to be implicated in the exercise of imperialism, the Department of the Interior might not be the first one that you would think of....

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Ellen Hazelkorn, “Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle for World-Class Excellence” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ellen Hazelkorn, Policy Advisor to the Higher Education Authority (Ireland) and Director of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU), Dublin Institute of Technology, provides an in-depth a...

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David Eaton, "World History through Case Studies: Historical Skills in Practice" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Teaching world history surveys can be a nightmare! How on Earth is anyone supposed to cover so much information from all over the world and from so many different time periods? It can be nothing sh...

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James M. Dorsey, “China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For all that China’s twenty-first-century ‘rise’ is a much-discussed notion both within the country and globally, it is an increasingly difficult concept to grasp or keep pace with. As a result, bo...

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Randy Nichols, “The Video Game Business” (British Film Institute, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Video games have become an important cultural and economic force in our media environment. In his new book, The Video Game Business (British Film Institute, 2014), scholar Randy Nichols provides an...

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Lisa Levenstein, "They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lisa Levenstein is the Director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her current book They Did...

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Nicholas Grant, “Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The links between African Americans and the global struggle for decolonization, particularly in Africa are well-documented. Facing similar kinds of repression that were rooted in systemic racism an...

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James Gelvin, “The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor James Gelvin joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the Arab Uprisings, democratization in the Middle-East and Northern Africa, ISIS, al-Qaeda, terrorism, and America’s role imposing neo-...

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Ravi Palat, "The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650" (Palgrave, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ravi Palat’s The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars (Palgrave, 2015) counters eurocentric notions of long-term historical change by drawing upon ...

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Stephen R. Platt, “Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age” (Knopf, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The reason for Great Britain’s war against China in the First Opium War (1839-42) is often taken as a given. British merchants wanted to “open” trade beyond the port of Canton (Guangzhou) and conti...

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Mrinalini Chakravorty, “In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a masterful account of the importance of the stereotype in English language South Asian literature. M...

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G. S. Rosenthal, "Beyond Hawai‘i: Native Labor in the Pacific World" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the century from the death of Captain James Cook in 1779 to the rise of the sugar plantations in the 1870s, thousands of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) men left Hawai‘i to work on ships at sea a...

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Nick Kapur, “Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nick Kapur’s Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Harvard University Press, 2018) is an ambitious look at the transformations of Japanese society after the massive protests ...

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Kirsteen Kim and Sebastian C. H. Kim, “A History of Korean Christianity” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Korea presents a fascinating chapter in the history of Christianity. For instance, the first continuous Christian community in the peninsula was founded by Koreans themselves without any missionari...

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

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

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Antonio Sotomayor, “The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico” (U Nebraska Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Antonio Sotomayor, Assistant Professor and Librarian of Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sotomayor is the author of Th...

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Henry Shue, “Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can a practical philosophical perspective concerned with justice and fairness help us address the problem of climate change? Henry Shue (Merton College, Oxford) tackles this essential question ...

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Post Script: A Deep Dive on China from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s begins a new set of podcasts from New Books in Political Science called POST-SCRIPT. Lilly Goren and I invite authors back to the podcast to react to contemporary political developments tha...

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Amanda Walsh, “Globalisation, the State and Regional Australia” (Sydney UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Globalisation, the State and Regional Australia (Sydney University Press, 2018), Amanda Walsh, associate director of government relations at Australian Catholic University, explore...

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Eric Reed, “Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, ...

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

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

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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...

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Sarah S. Bush, “The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah S. Bush is the author of The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Dunn is an assistant professor in the Depa...

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

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

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Ellen R. Wald, “Saudi Inc.: The Arabian Kingdom’s Pursuit of Power and Profit” (Pegasus Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ellen R. Wald’s timely, well-written history of the Saudi national oil company, Saudi Inc. The Arabian Kingdom’s Pursuit of Power and Profit (Pegasus Books, 2018), is as much the story of the Saudi...

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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 ...

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John C. McManus, "Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943 (Dutton Caliber, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For most Americans, the war the United States waged in the Pacific in the Second World War was one fought primarily by the Navy and the Marine Corps. As John C. McManus demonstrates in Fire and For...

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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...

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James Laine, “Meta-Religion: Religion and Power in World History” (U of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most world religions textbooks follow a structure and conceptual framework that mirrors the modern discourse of world religions as distinct entities reducible to certain defining characteristics. I...

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W. J. Perry and T. Z. Collina, "The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump" (BenBella Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, American nuclear policy continues to be influenced by the legacies of the Cold War. Nuclear policies remain focused on easily identifiable threats,...

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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 ...

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Denis Dragovic, “Religion and Post-Conflict Statebuilding: Roman Catholic and Sunni Islamic Perspectives” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The subject of statebuilding has only become a more visible issue since the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union. Since the 1990s, the world has continued to deal with a host of pro...

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Rebecca E. Karl, "China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History" (Verso, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China’s emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation’s “great rejuvenation,” a...

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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 ...

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Jenifer Van Vleck, “Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

[Re-posted with permission from Who Makes Cents?] Today’s guest discusses the history of aviation and how this provides a lens to interpret the history of capitalism and U.S. foreign relations acro...

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Laurie M. Wood, "Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians have long treated the Atlantic and Indian Ocean routes of early modern French empire separately. But, early modern people understood France as a bi-oceanic empire, connected by vast but ...

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Rupali Mishra, “A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though today the public and private sectors are treated as distinct if not separate, the situation was quite different in early modern England. Back then the two were often intertwined, with one of...

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Rory Carroll, “Comandante: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela” (Penguin Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historically, Venezuela is known as one of the most stable Latin American nations of the twentieth century. The subsequent discovery of oil transformed Venezuela into a petrostate. Yet wealth inequ...

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The Cold War as History from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Cold War, the on again and off again confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union is one of the most famous historical episodes of the short twentieth century. Accordingly, it is not sur...

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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...

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Benjamin Schmidt, “Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad ...

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Thomas J. Donahue-Ochoa, "Unfreedom for All: How the World's Injustices Harm You" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How should we understand and combat injustice? Is it only the responsibility of those who suffer the consequences or perpetrate the harm? When it comes to addressing injustice, for many the first s...

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Melani McAlister, “The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Melani McAlister’s The Kingdom of God Has No Borders (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a global history of evangelicals since 1945 and focuses on the complexities and contradictions that encompass...

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Nancy Shoemaker, “Native American Whalemen and the World” (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For as long as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has been a staple of the American literary canon, one element often goes unnoticed. The ship commanded by the monomanacial Ahab on his quest to slay the ...

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

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

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The Invisible Committee, “Now” (Semiotext(e), 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What could the communism of the future be? In Now (Semiotext(e), 2017), The Invisible Committee explores our current crisis by thinking through key critical theory questions, along with specific i...

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Ed Conway, “The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944” (Pegasus Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The functioning of the global economy remains as relevant a topic as ever before. Commentators continue to debate the causes and consequences of the financial crisis that hit the United States from...

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

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

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Stephen Tankel, “With Us and Against Us: How America’s Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With Us and Against Us: How America’s Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror (Columbia University Press, 2018) offers readers a fresh, insightful and new perspective on US counterterrorism coop...

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Asaad al-Saleh, “Voices of the Arab Spring: Personal Stories from the Arab Revolutions” (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Asaad al-Saleh is assistant professor of Arabic, comparative literature, and cultural studies in the Department of Languages and Literature and the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. His...

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Jeremy Black, "History of Europe: From Prehistory to the 21st Century" (Arcturus, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In History of Europe: From Prehistory to the 21st Century,?Jeremy Black?presents a learned and yet entertaining exploration of the history: political, cultural and social of Europe from its prehist...

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Molly Warsh, “American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The early-modern Atlantic World was a chaotic place over which European empires frequently had little control. In her new book American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (Universi...

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Robin Grier and Jerry F. Hough, “The Long Process of Development” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to a popular saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.” As concernswhat economists and political scientists call “development”–that is, progress towards libertyand prosperity–the saying see...

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Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book Feminisms: A Global History (University of Chic...

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Ilene Grabel, “When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We spoke with Ilene Grabel, Professor at the University of Denver and Co-director of the MA program in Global Finance, Trade & Economic Integration at the Josef Korbel School of International Studi...

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Deborah Cowen, “The Deadly Life of Logistics” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our guest today tells us that the seemingly straightforward field of logistics lies at the heart of contemporary globalization, imperialism, and economic inequality. Listen to Deb Cowen, the author...

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Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming" (HarperOne, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We sit at the beginning of what could be “both a truly terrifying and a golden era in humanity.” In The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming (HarperOne, 2020), l...

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Courtney Fullilove, “The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th...

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Pedro Machado, “Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa, and the Indian Ocean, c.1750-1850” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pedro Machado‘s Ocean of Trade:South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c.1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed and engaging account of Gujarati merchants and...

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Michael Schuman, "Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World" (PublicAffairs, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We stand on the eve of a different kind of world, but comprehending it is difficult: we are so accustomed to dealing with the paradigms of the contemporary world that we inevitably take them for gr...

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Richard Ivan Jobs, “Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ever go backpacking through Europe? In Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Richard Ivan Jobs traces the postwar cultural history of the mak...

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Ellen Boucher, “Empire’s Children” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For almost 100 years, it seemed like a good, even wholesome and optimistic idea to take young, working-class and poor British children and resettle them, quite on their own and apart from their fam...

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Alanna O’Malley, "The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo Crisis, 1960-1964" (Manchester UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the summer of 1960, the Republic of the Congo won its independence from Belgium. Only one week later, however, Belgium had already dispatched paratroopers into the country and the Congolese gove...

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Heather Curtis, “Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The study of Christianity, international relations, and the United States is going through something of a boom period at the moment. Scholars are working to understand how Christians looked at the ...

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Torild Skard, “Women of Power” (Policy Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Torild Skard is the author of Women of Power: Half a Century of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers Worldwide (Policy Press, 2015). Skard is a senior researcher in women’s studies at the Norwegia...

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Steven J. L. Taylor, "Exiles, Entrepreneurs, and Educators: African Americans in Ghana" (SUNY Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

African Americans have a long history of emigration. In Exiles, Entrepreneurs, and Educators: African Americans in Ghana, Steven J. L. Taylor explores the second wave of African American exiles or ...

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Victor Bulmer?Thomas, “Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present and Future of the United States” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A respected authority on 19th- and 20th-century Latin American and Caribbean History as well as a past Director at Chatham House, Victor Bulmer?Thomas, CMG, OBE provides the reader with a most unus...

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Stuart Young, “Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China” (U of Hawaii Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Stuart Young examines Chinese hagiographic representations of three Indian Buddhist patriarchs–Asvaghosa (...

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

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

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Jamie Stern-Weiner, “Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions” (OR Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jamie Stern-Weiner’s new edited volume, Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions (OR Books, 2018) seeks to clarify what it would take to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict...

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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...

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

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

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Guy Laron, “The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The title of Guy Laron’s The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University Press, 2017) says it all. As Laron notes in this interview, the fact that the war led to ongoing conflicts...

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Mariana Candido, “An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mariana Candido‘s book An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World. Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is a powerful and moving exploration of the history and develop...

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George Lawson, "Anatomies of Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The success of populist politicians and the emergence of social justice movements around the world, and the recent demonstrations against police violence in the United States, demonstrate a widespr...

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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...

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Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Ed...

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Micol Seigel, "Violence Work: State Violence and the Limits of Police" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Recent calls for the defunding or abolition of police raise important questions about the legitimacy of state violence and the functions that police are supposed to serve. Criticism of the militari...

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Matthew Casey, “Empire’s Guestworkers: Haitian Migrants in Cuba During the Age of US Occupation” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early 20th century, thousands of Haitian men, women and children traveled to Cuba in search of work and wages. In Matthew Casey’s, Empire’s Guestworkers: Haitian Migrants in Cuba During the ...

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Aristotle Tziampiris, “The Emergence of Israeli-Greek Cooperation” (Springer, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Aristotle Tziampiris is The Emergence of Israeli-Greek Cooperation (Springer, 2015). Tziampiris is Associate Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International and Eu...

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Thomas C. Field Jr. et al., "Latin America and the Global Cold War" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Latin America and the Global Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) analyzes more than a dozen of Latin America’s forgotten encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Communist world, and b...

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Frank L. Holt, “The Treasures of Alexander the Great: How One Man’s Wealth Shaped the World” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most studies of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander III focus on the military aspects of his life and reign. Yet Alexander’s campaigns would not have been possible had it not been for the enormous p...

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Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “Genocidal Nightmares” (Bloomsbury, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Genocide studies is one of the few academic fields with which I’m acquainted which is truly interdisciplinary in approach and composition. Today’s guest Abdelwahab El-Affendi, and the book he has e...

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Mona L. Siegel, "Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights After the First World" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are all familiar with the story of how in early 1919 heads of state and diplomats from around the world came to Paris to negotiate a peace settlement with a defeated Germany and its allies. Many...

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Craig Symonds, “World War II at Sea: A Global History” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though there are numerous books about the naval history of the Second World War, very few of them attempt to cover the span of the conflict within the confines of a single volume. Craig Symonds und...

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Amanda Rogers, “Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geographies of Performance” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Identity, performance and globalisation are at the heart of the cultural practices interrogated by Amanda Rogers in Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geography of Perfor...

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Why Did the Allies Win World War One? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Great War was perhaps the greatest single upheaval of the 20th century. While World War II saw more lives lost, in terms of the shock to European/Western civilization, the Great War was a more ...

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Zoltan Pall, “Salafism in Lebanon: Local and Transnational Movements” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zoltan Pall‘s Salafism in Lebanon: Local and Transnational Movements (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a just published ethnographic investigation of the rise of Salafism among Lebanese Sunni Mus...

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

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

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Lauren Turek, "To Bring the Good News to All Nations" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lauren Turek is an Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She earned her doctorate from the University of Virginia in 2015 and holds a degree in Museum Studies ...

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Sarah Snyder, “From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed Foreign Policy” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Human rights as a concern in U.S. foreign policy and international politics has been well-documented, particularly in studies of the Carter Administration. However, how human rights emerged as an i...

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Kaeten Mistry, “The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the annals of cold war history Italy is rarely seen as a crucial locale. In his stimulating new book, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare (Cambridge ...

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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...

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Gordon Mathews, “The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we think of globalization and global cities, we might be inclined to think of New York or London. Yet in recent years, Guangzhou, the central manufacturing node in the world, has acted as a ma...

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

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

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Joyce E. Leader, "From Hope to Horror: Diplomacy and the Making of the Rwanda Genocide" (Potomac Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Earlier this year the world marked the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide. An occasion for mourning and reflection also offered a chance to reflect on the state of research about the genocide...

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Jeff Koelher, “Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup” (Bloomsbury, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is life without coffee possible? Before you answer, first admit that you know almost nothing about the plant that you depend on to deliver you conscious into your day. You will learn from Jeff Koe...

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Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch, eds., “We are Strong: Wartime Origins and the Future United Nations” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch are the co-editors of We Are Strong: Wartime Origins and the Future United Nations (Routledge, 2015). Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science and Director E...

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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...

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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Knowing about China,” Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey Wasserstrom note in the preface to China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2018), is today “an...

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Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, “The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn‘s An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010 (Oxford University Press, reprint edition 2014) offers what is in...

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Ilya Somin, "Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we think of democracy, we typically think of voting; and when we think of voting, we ordinarily have elections and campaigns in minds. In this intuitive sense, voting is a matter of casting a ...

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Sumita Mukherjee, “Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks (Oxford University Press, 2018), Sumita Mukherjee highlights the centrality of Indian women in the fight for the v...

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Bedross Der Matossian, “Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the Ottoman constitution, suspended earlier by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and initiated a new period of parliamentary politics in the Empire. Likewise, the re...

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Jane Gordon, "Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement (Routledge, 2020) bridges current policy debates around citizenship, states, and nations, and theoretical analysis of issues of belonging, consent, and fr...

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Ignacio Aguiló, “The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism, and Crisis in Argentina” (U Wales Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism, and Crisis in Argentina (University of Wales Press, 2018), Ignacio Aguiló studies the sociocultural impact caused by the failure of the IMF economic me...

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Don H. Doyle, “The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War” (Basic Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many Americans know about the military side of the Civil War, and the private, official diplomacy of the Civil War is also well documented. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the...

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Richard Lachmann, "First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers" (Verso, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Lachmann’s First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers (Verso, 2020) is a two-for-one deal. The first half of the book is a historical analysis ...

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

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

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Robin Shields, “Globalization and International Education” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Studying the forces behind and the implications for education’s ascension as a predominant global phenomenon is becoming a more important, yet convoluted, endeavor. Envisioned as a way to succinctl...

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Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink" (Columbia Global Reports, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This podcast was recorded on May 21st, 2020 – the same day that the Chinese government proposed new national security laws that would give China greater control over Hong Kong. What motivates these...

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Ben Clift, “The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis by Ben Clift” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I was joined in Oxford by Ben Clift, Professor of Political Economy, Deputy Head of Department and Director of Research at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of ...

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Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, “The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire” (Verso, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Two Canadian socialist thinkers have published a new book on the successes and failures, the crises, contradictions and conflicts in present-day capitalism. In The Making of Global Capitalism: The ...

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Toshihiro Higuchi, "Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2020), Toshihiro Higuchi presents a history of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Tr...

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

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

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Emilie Cloatre, “Pills for the Poorest: An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa” (Palgrave, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emilie Cloatre‘s award-winning book, Pills for the Poorest:An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave, 2013), locates the effects–and ineffectualness–of a land...

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Courtney J. Fung, "China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China is a veto-holding member of the UN Security Council yet Chinese officials have been skeptical of using the powers of the UN to pressure nations accused of human rights violations. The PRC has...

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

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

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Bilyana Lily, “Russian Foreign Policy toward Missile Defense” (Lexington Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The current conflict in Ukraine has reopened old wounds and brought the complexity of Russia’s relationship with the United States and Europe to the forefront. One of the most important factors in ...

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Richard Haass, "The World: A Brief Introduction" (Penguin, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and foreign policy advisor to four U.S. presidents, has written a primer on international relations in his new book The World: A Brief I...

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Ashoka Mody, “Eurotragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For decades the implementation of a single European currency was seen by its advocates as a vital step in the post-World War II movement toward greater European integration. As Ashoka Mody details ...

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Carol Gould, “Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contemporary advances in technology have in many ways made the world smaller. It is now possible for vast numbers of geographically disparate people to interact, communicate, coordinate, and plan....

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Andrew Monaghan, "Dealing with the Russians" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are the generals fighting the last war? In Dealing with the Russians (Polity, 2019), Andrew Monaghan argues that Western policy makers are using an outdated Cold War model of ideology, language and...

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David Baker, “The Schooled Society: The Educational Transformation of Global Culture” (Stanford UP 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There has been a dramatic leap in education across the world over the past 150 years–from the importance and longevity to Western-style universities to truth and knowledge production created throug...

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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...

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Ji-Yeon O. Jo, “Homing: An Affective Topography of Ethnic Korean Return Migration” (U Hawaii Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For anyone with an interest in Korean studies, the study of diaspora and globalization, and indeed in broader questions around transnational identities and encounters in East Asia and beyond, Homin...

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Jan Lemnitzer, “Power, Law and the End of Privateering” (Palgrave, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jan Lemnitzer‘s new book Power, Law and the End of Privateering (Palgrave, 2014) offers an exciting new take on the relationship between law and power, exposing the delicate balance between great p...

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Why did the Allies win World War II? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why did the Allies win World War II? In the this podcast of Arguing History, Professor of History Emeritus at Exeter University, Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Societ...

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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...

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Elizabeth Schmidt, “Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth Schmidt‘sForeign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2013)depicts the foreign political and military interventions in Africa during...

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Valerie Hansen, "The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World -- and Globalization Began" (Scribner, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Globalization is a modern phenomenon with a longer past than most people realize. As Valerie Hansen explains in her book The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began ...

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Jeffrey Ahlman, “Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana” (Ohio University Press, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1957 Ghana achieved its independence from Great Britain under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. In Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2017)...

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Michael Kwass, “Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground” (Harvard University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Kwass‘s new book, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground is much more than an exciting biography of the notorious eighteenth-century smuggler whose name remains le...

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Jeremy Black, "Military Strategy: A Global History" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter University, is one of the most insightful historians of military strategy from early modernity to the present day. In his most recent book, Military Str...

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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...

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Carl H. Nightingale, “Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities” (U of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We often think of South Africa or America when we hear the word ‘segregation.’ Or — a popular view — that social groups have always chosen to live apart.But as Carl H. Nightingale shows in his new ...

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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 - ...

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Toufoul Abou-Hodeib, “A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Toufoul Abou-Hodeib‘s A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the urban history of Beirut precisely...

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Jules Boykoff, “Activism and the Olympics: Dissent at the Games in Vancouver and London” (Rutgers University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A new chapter in the history of the Olympic Games appears to be opening. As one city after another has dropped out of the bidding for the 2022 Winter Games, the International Olympic Committee has ...

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Max Blumenthal, "The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (Verso, 2019), Max Blumenthal excavates the real, connected story behind the...

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Matthew Karp, “This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at The Helm of American Foreign Policy” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most people know that slavery was foundational to the economic development of the United States in the antebellum period. Fewer people are aware that slavery was also important for American foreign...

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Lyman Johnson, “Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776-1810” (Duke UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lyman Johnson‘s book Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776-1810 (Duke University Press, 2011) analyzes the economic, political, and social lives of working peopl...

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Asa McKercher, "Canada and the World since 1867" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you haven’t been able to tell by the way I pronounce the word “about,” I should probably let you know that I’m from Canada. And I have to make a confession––growing up in Vancouver, I was fed th...

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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 ...

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General Daniel Bolger, “Why We Lost” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the past several years, numerous books and articles have appeared that grapple with the legacy and lessons of the recent U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This development should surprise f...

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Alexander Mikaberidze, "The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the battles most closely associated with the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous warfare affect the w...

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Benjamin Bryce, “To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society” (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benjamin Bryce, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia, has written a history of belonging within a culturally plural Argentina. To Belong in Buenos Aires: Ge...

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Henry Nau, “Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy under Jefferson, Reagan, Truman, and Polk” (Princeton UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have raised important questions about the future direction of U.S. foreign policy and how Americans can best exercise power abroad in the coming years. Comme...

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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 ...

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Jörg Matthias Determann, “Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories, and Nationalism in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Space Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Arab exploration of space, offers a fascinating i...

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Kathleen Lopez, “Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History” (UNC Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Successive waves of migration brought thousands of Chinese laborers to Cuba over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The coolie trade, which was meant to replace waning supplies of slaves, was ...

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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...

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Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (PublicAffairs, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz...

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Chris Taylor, “How Star Wars Conquered the Universe” (Basic Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When George Lucas first began to write “The Star Wars”, as it was originally known, he had no idea that it would become his main life’s work. Beginning as a modern Flash Gordon-style space adventur...

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Jonathan Scott, "How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Scott is one of the most original interpreters of the early modern world. How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800 (Yale University Press, 2019) is a deft an...

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Jessica Elkind, “Aid Under Fire: Nation Building and the Vietnam War” (U Kentucky Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As any scholar of the Vietnam War can tell you, the field doesn’t lack for study: it’s one of the most-studied fields for both military and diplomatic historians. And yet, for all of the scholarly ...

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Alexander Cooley, “Great Game, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Central Asia is one of the least studied and understood regions of the Eurasian landmass, conjuring up images of 19th century Great Power politics, endless steppe, and impenetrable regimes. Alexand...

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Michelle Murray, "The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is a rising power – like China – a threat to the world order? The conventional wisdom in international relations says that power transitions – particularly increases in military power – are intrins...

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Nathan Marcus, “Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921-1931” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Harvard University Press, 2018), Nathan Marcus, analyzes the events that took place around the financial crisis in Austria ...

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Ethan Zuckerman, “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection” (Norton, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early days of the Internet, optimists saw the future as highly connected, where voices from across the globe would mingle and learn from one another as never before. However, as Ethan Zucker...

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The Origins of World War One from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who or what originated and/or caused the Great War from breaking out in July 1914? Was it Serbia with its expansionist and aggressive designs on Austria-Hungary? Was it Austria-Hungary itself, unne...

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Ji-Young Lee, “China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination” (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ji-Young Lee’s book investigates the changing nature of tribute relations during the Ming and High Qing between a dominant China and its less powerful neighbors, Korea and Japan. China’s Hegemony: ...

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Michael Cook, “Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Cook, a widely-respected historian and scholar of Islam begins his book with a question that everyone seems to be asking these days: is Islam uniquely violent or uniquely political? Why doe...

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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...

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Yutao Sun and Seamus Grimes, “China and Global Value Chains” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I was joined by Seamus Grimes from Ireland where he is Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. With Yutao Sun (Dalian University of Technology), he just published a ...

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Angela Stent, “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twentieth-First Century” (Princeton University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2005, the Comedy Central Network aired an episode of “South Park” in which one of the characters asked if any “Third World” countries other than Russia had the ability to fly a whale to the moon...

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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...

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Lisa A. Lindsay, “Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The title of Lisa A. Lindsay’s book Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), invokes enduring family ties, as well as the con...

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Mark Corner, “The European Union: An Introduction” (I. B. Tauris, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Some say it should be a loose collection of sovereign nation states; others say it should aspire to be a kind of super-nation state itself. Or is it, in truth, a messy but workable mixture of a num...

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Maria Ryan, "Full Spectrum Dominance: Irregular Warfare and the War on Terror" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

America's war on terror is widely defined by the Afghanistan and Iraq fronts. Yet, as this book demonstrates, both the international campaign and the new ways of fighting that grew out of it played...

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Jonah Goldberg, “Suicide of the West” (Crown Forum, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy (Crown Forum, 2018), conservative Jonah Goldberg argues that Amer...

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Joel Migdal, “Shifting Sands: The United States and the Middle East” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Any person who turns on CNN or Fox News today will see that the United States faces a number of critical problems in the Middle East. This reality should surprise few. Stunned by the Al-Qaeda attac...

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

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

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Nadia Yaqub and Rula Quawas, “Bad Girls of the Arab World” (U Texas Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Modeled on Bad Girls of Japan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press, 2017), edited by Nadia Yaqub and the late Rula Quawas stands apart from the edited ...

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James Martin, “Drugs on the Dark Net: How Cryptomarkets are Transforming the Global Trade in Illicit Drugs” (Palgrave, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I am old enough to realise that we have entered a science fiction world in which the old systems of the market place are being sidestepped by new technology. We who follow the tried and true method...

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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...

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Steven Gray, “Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the shor...

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Guy Chet, “The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856” (U of Massachusetts Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Guy Chet, Associate Professor of early American and military history at the University of North Texas, in his book The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688...

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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 ...

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William R. Polk, “Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (Yale University Press, 2018) is an ambitious attempt to cover, in one volume, the entire history of the relat...

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Hideaki Fujiki, “Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stardom has a history. Hideaki Fujiki‘s new book traces that history through a story of the transformations of Japanese film stars in the early twentieth century. Taking a deeply transnational appr...

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

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

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David Pilling, “The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations” (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What’s not to like about economic growth, you might ask? Well, quite a lot, it turns out, once we begin to examine how GDP and other measures of the economy are constructed, and once we see what th...

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Randall L. Schweller, “Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple: Global Discord in the New Millennium” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Randall L. Schweller is Professor of Political Science and a Social and Behavioral Sciences Joan N. Huber Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University. He has written Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden App...

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Slavery in World History from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Notwithstanding the fact that slavery is almost as old if not older than human civilization itself, involving almost every country and continent on the face of the planet, the vast majority of scho...

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Lee Morgenbesser, “Behind the Facade: Elections under Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia” (SUNY Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the 1990s, vast sums of money and time have been invested in training and resources to hold elections around the world, including in parts of Southeast Asia. The conventional wisdom is that e...

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Martin Shaw, “Genocide and International Relations” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Works in the field of genocide studies tend to fall into one of a few camps. Some are emotional and personal. Others are historical and narrative. Still others are intentionally activist and aim...

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Shai M. Dromi, "Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How should we understand humanitarian NGOs? In Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Shai M. Dromi, a lecturer in sociolog...

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Antony G. Hopkins, “American Empire: A Global History” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In an expansive, engrossing, voluminously in depth analysis of the subject, Professor A. G. Hopkins, Professor Emeritus of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, one of the foremost h...

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Stefan Rinke and Kay Schiller (editors), “The FIFA World Cup 1930-2010: Politics, Commerce, Spectacle and Identities” (Wallstein, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of globalization is found in more than international political organizations and multinational corporations, free-trade agreements and foreign direct investments, satellite communicatio...

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Bari Weiss, "How to Fight Anti-Semitism" (Crown, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anti-semitism is on the rise in the U.S. and other parts of the world. 6 people died this week in Jersey City, New Jersey, in a shootout at a kosher supermarket. The two gunmen appear to have been ...

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Jonathan D. Quick, “The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It” (St. Martin’s Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A leading doctor offers answers on the one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we prevent the next global pandemic? The 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia terrified the world?and revealed...

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Toby Green, “The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the B...

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Alan Gallay, "Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sir Walter Ralegh was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. She showered him with estates and political appointments. He envisioned her becoming empress of a universal empire. She gave him the opportunity...

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Daniel Livesay, “Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many were wealthy, but others were destitute. Many traveled to Britain to be educated, some returned to Jamaica, others went to India to seek careers and fortunes. They were members of families, wi...

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Judith Kelley, “Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Often Fails” (Princeton UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Judith Kelley is the author of Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Often Fails (Princeton University Press, 2012). Kelley is associate professor of publ...

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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...

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Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny, “Russia’s Empires” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Names can be deceiving. Americans call the area where Moscow’s writ runs “Russia.” But the official name of this place is the “Russian Federation.” Federation of what, you ask? Well, there are a lo...

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Samuel Totten, “Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains of Sudan” (Transaction Publishers, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most of the authors I’ve interviewed for this show have addressed episodes in the past, campaigns of mass violence that occurred long ago, often well-before the author was born. Today’s show is di...

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William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, "Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture" (Fordham UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The neoliberal consensus, once thought to be undefeatable, seems to have been broken both in the wake of the fiscal crisis of 2008, as well as a series of surprise movements and elections throughou...

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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 ...

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Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014), Amit Prasad, an associate professor of sociology at the Universit...

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Jeremy Black, "Geographies of an Imperial Power: The British World, 1688-1815" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we talk to Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter University, UK, about two of his most recent book projects, both of which relate to the ways in which we think about empires, and the B...

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Nic Cheeseman, “Institutions and Democracy in Africa” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the contributors challenge the argument that African states lack ...

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Donovan Chau, “Exploiting Africa: The Influence of Maoist China in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania” (NIP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Donovan Chau is the author of Exploiting Africa: The Influence of Maoist China in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania (Naval Institute Press, 2014). Chau is an associate professor of political science at ...

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Elizabeth Economy, "The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A trade war with China has dangerous implications for the global economy. What began more than a year ago with President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs has become an unpleasant economic reality...

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Sarah S. Stroup and Wendy H. Wong, “The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs” (Cornell University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs (Cornell University Press, 2017), Sarah S. Stroup and Wendy H. Wong argue that a small set of international nongovernmental organizati...

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Benjamin Lieberman, “Remaking Identities: God, Nation and Race in World History” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do you say to someone who suggests that genocide is not just destructive, but constructive? This is the basic theme of Benjamin Lieberman‘s excellent new book Remaking Identities: God, Natio...

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Alice Hill, "Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Climate change impacts-more heat, drought, extreme rainfall, and stronger storms-have already harmed communities around the globe. Even if the world could cut its carbon emissions to zero tomorrow,...

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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, ...

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John L. Brooke, “Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Climate change is in the news a lot today. There seems to be little doubt that it’s getting warmer and that, should present trends continue, the warming trend will have “historical” consequences. T...

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Brendan Simms, "Hitler: A Global Biography" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immense--in an effort to understand the role of that e...

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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 ...

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Brett Scott, “The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money” (Pluto Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brett Scott is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto Press, 2013). Scott is a journalist, urban deep ecologist, and Fellow at the Finance Innovatio...

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Raj Patel, "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Award winning activist and researcher Raj Patel has teamed up with innovative environmental historian and historical geographer Jason W. Moore to produce an accessible book which provides historica...

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Maha Nassar, “Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The study of Palestine and Israel has been largely shaped by the politics of the conflict and thus, many scholars start with political history, often using Israeli state sources. Maha Nassar, in Br...

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Paula A. Michaels, “Lamaze: An International History” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The twentieth-century West witnessed a revolution in childbirth. Before that time, most women gave birth at home and were attended by family members and midwives. The process was usually terribly ...

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Christopher A. Preble, "Fuel to the Fire: How Trump made America’s Foreign Policy Even Worse" (Cato Institute, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump broke not only from the Republican Party consensus but also from the bipartisan consensus on the direction of recent U.S. foreign policy. Calling the Iraq ...

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John Broich, “Squadron: Ending the African Slave Trade” (Overlook Duckworth Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained in the western Indian Ocean through the mid-1800s, even after the cessation of most imperial slave trading activiti...

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Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” (Henry Holt, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The paleontologist Michael Benton describes a mass extinction event as a time when “vast swaths of the tree of life are cut short, as if by crazed, axe wielding madmen.” Elizabeth Kolbert‘s new boo...

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M. Schneider-Mayerson and B. R. Bellamy, "An Ecotopian Lexicon" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By choice or not, the catastrophes of global warming and mass extinction task young generations with reorienting human relationships with the earth’s systems, resources, and lifeforms. The extracta...

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Daphna Hacker, “Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As debates on globalization rage in the twenty-first century, many countries and the people within them have been challenged socially, economically, and legally. At the same time, our world is now ...

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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...

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The Treaty of Versailles On Hundred Years On from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Versailles Treaty of 1919, celebrates its one-hundred anniversary this year. And, yet unlike the more recent centenaries, such as that of the outbreak of the Great War or the Russian Revolution...

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C. Grant and H. Schippers, “Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Perspective” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2016), a multi-authored volume co-edited by Catherine Grant and Huib Schippers, examines a range of music...

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Miriam Kingsberg, “Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in...

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Benjamin Breen, "The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade" (U Penn Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Benjamin Breen's The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), we are transported back to a time when there was no such thing as "recreation...

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Mark G. Hanna, “Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740” (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark G. Hanna offers a unique perspective on the roles played by piracy in the formation of the British colonial project. In Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740 (Universit...

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Sean D. Murphy et al., “Litigating War: Mass Civil Injury and the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor Sean D. Murphy is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at George Washington University and co-author of the book Litigating War: Mass Civil Injury and the Eritrea-Ethiopi...

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Beth Fischer, "The Myth of Triumphalism: Rethinking President Reagan's Cold War Legacy" (UP of Kentucky, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every time that I teach any portion of a course dealing with Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War, I gird myself for the inevitable myth-busting that I’m going to do. The idea that Reagan won ...

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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...

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Odette Lienau, “Rethinking Sovereign Debt” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1927 Russian-American legal theorist Alexander Sack introduced the doctrine of “odious debt.” Sack argued that a state’s debt is “odious” and should not be transferable to successor governments ...

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James M. Vaughn, "The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his notes for a speech to be delivered in the House of Commons in the wake of American Independence, the MP and imperial reformer Edmund Burke observed that ‘Some people are great Lovers of unif...

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Mahon Murphy, “Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The First World War was not limited the trenches on the Western Front. Nor was the system of internment camps it spawned. In his new book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment ...

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John R. Gillis, “The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coa...

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Matthew Lockwood, "To Begin The World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Growing up as an American, you’re bound to be all-but-suffused with triumphalist histories of the American Revolution. Those histories might have a tough of the Hegelian to them, asserting that the...

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Harrod Suarez, “The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora” (U Illinois Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Harrod Suarez‘s new book The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2017) focuses on the domestic workers that make up around a third of all overs...

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Emma Teng, “Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emma Teng‘s new book explores the discourses about Eurasian identity, and the lived experiences of Eurasian people, in China, Hong Kong, and the US between the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1...

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Julia Neuberger, "Antisemitism: What It Is, What It Isn’t, Why It Matters" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anti-Semitic incidents, ranging from vandalism through murder, are on the rise in Great Britain, and across Europe and North America. Julia Neuberger - Senior Rabbi at West London Synagogue, a memb...

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Brian Jenkins, “Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War” (McGill-Queens UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Described upon his death in 1887 as the ideal diplomatist, Richard Lyons served Great Britain in a variety of roles over the course of a long and distinguished career. In Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in ...

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Aswin Punthamabekar, “From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry” (NYU Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Aswin Punthamabekar‘s From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (New York University Press, 2013) offers a deeply researched and richly theorized look at the evolution of the...

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Audrey Kurth Cronin, "Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Never have so many possessed the means to be so lethal. The diffusion of modern technology (robotics, cyber weapons, 3-D printing, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence) to ordinary peopl...

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

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

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Constance DeVereaux and Martin Griffin, “Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy” (Ashgate, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (Ashgate, 2013), a new book by Constance DeVereaux (Colorado State University) and Martin Griffin (Uni...

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Victoria Reyes, "Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (S...

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

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

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Jules Boykoff, “Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 22nd Winter Olympics are underway. It’s safe to say that the lead-up has not gone smoothly. Of course, there have been the obligatory cost overruns, crony contracts, displacement of locals, and...

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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...

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

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

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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...

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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 ...

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

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

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

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

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Kate O'Neill, "Waste" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Waste is one of the planet’s last great resource frontiers. From furniture made from up-cycled wood to gold extracted from computer circuit boards, artisans and multinational corporations alike are...

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

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

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Michael J. Hathaway, “Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do they happen so differently in different places? I...

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What Should We Think of the British Empire? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The British Empire at its greatest extent covered approximately twenty-five percent of the surface of the globe with the same percentage of the world so population under its rule, directly or indir...

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Herman Salton, “Dangerous Diplomacy: Bureaucracy, Power Politics and the Role of the UN Secretariat in Rwanda” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I was in graduate school during Bosnia and Rwanda. Like everyone else, I watched the video footage and journalistic accounts that came from these two zones of atrocity. Like everyone else, I wonder...

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

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

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Elizabeth Bernstein, "Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking and the Politics of Freedom" (U Chicago, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth Bernstein, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College about her newest book, Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking and the Politics of Free...

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Andrew McKevitt, “Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (UNC Press, 2017), Andrew McKevitt explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future look...

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Melissa Aronczyk, “Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity, Melissa Aronczyk locates the rise of nation branding as a response to the perceived need to sculpt national identity in the face of...

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Michael Khodarkovsky, "Russia's 20th Century: A Journey in 100 Histories" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dissecting and digesting the history of the Soviet "experiment" can be a frustrating exercise for academics and a Sisphyan task for laymen; the endeavor demands scrutiny of the facts — and they are...

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Stewart Patrick, “The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World” (Brookings Institution Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World (Brookings Institution Press, 2017) is an important and in depth study of American interaction with the intricate concept of Sovereignty, fr...

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

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

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Appeasement Eighty Years On from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to one dictionary definition, the term means: “to yield or concede to the belligerent demands of (a nation, group, person, etc.) in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of just...

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April Mayes, “The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race and Dominican National Identity” (U. Press of Florida, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a perceptive challenge to longstanding assumptions about Dominican anti-Haitianism, April J. Mayes finds fresh ways to think about the production of race in late 19th and 20th century Dominican ...

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Gabrielle Hecht, “Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We tend to understand the nuclear age as a historical break, a geopolitical and technological rupture. In Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012), Gabrielle Hecht tra...

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Pierre Asselin, "Vietnam’s American War: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Do we need another book on the Vietnam War? Pierre Asselin, Dwight E. Stanford Chair in the History of US Foreign Relations at San Diego State University, thinks that we do. While he has already pu...

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miriam cooke, “Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience, and the Syrian Revolution” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Syrian Revolution, which began in March 2011, has since resulted in what can be described as a civil war, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the forced migrations of millions of...

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Robyn Rodriguez, “Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World” (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While it has become typical to see Filipina/o migrants working in nursing or domestic work in the United States, many are surprised to see Filipina/os doing the same work in Hong Kong, Israel, and ...

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Helen Rozwadowski, "Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans" (Reaktion Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Helen Rozwadowski talks about the history of the oceans and how these oceans have shaped human history in profound ways. Rozwadowski is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, Aver...

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Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, “The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over the past century, virtually every Iranian—whether living in Iran or in the diaspora—has been exposed, to one degree or another, to certain commonly held nationalistic beliefs about what it mea...

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Eric Jennings, “Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonia...

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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...

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Michel Leiris, “Phantom Africa” (Seagull Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti empl...

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Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “The Devil That Never Dies” (Little, Brown and Co., 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are 13 million Jews in the world today. There are also 13 million Senegalese, 13 million Zambians, 13 million Zimbabweans, and 13 million Chadians. These are tiny–a realist might say “insigni...

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J. Yates and C. N. Murphy, "Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Standards are crucial to the way we live—just look around you. A no. 2 pencil, perhaps? That arrived in an 8x8.5x20 shipping container? Standards allow your computer and smart phone to connect seam...

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Kevan Harris, “A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran” (U. Cal Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kevan Harris is the author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (University of California Press, 2017). Harris is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Cal...

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Robert Gellately, “Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War” (Knopf, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It takes two to tango, right? Indeed it does. But it’s also true that someone has got to ask someone else to dance before any tangoing is done. Beginning in the 1960s, the American intellectual eli...

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Margaret E. Schotte, "Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks,...

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Colleen Murphy, “The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Colleen Murphy’s new book, The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2017), argues that attaining some degree of justice is possible in nations transitioning t...

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Christopher Powell, “Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide” (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What exactly is genocide? Is there a fundamental difference between episodes of genocide and how we go about our daily life? Or can it be said that the roots of the modern world, or civilization it...

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Eyal Mayroz, "Reluctant Interveners: America's Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur" (Rutgers UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why don’t governments do more to prevent genocide? What role does the public have in compelling their governments to take an active stand in the face of genocide? In Reluctant Interveners: America'...

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Sheshalatha Reddy, “British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) examines historical and literary texts relating to three rebellion...

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John K. Thornton, “A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820” (Cambridge UP, 2012). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of historical research over the ...

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

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

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Mandy Sayer, “Australian Gypsies: Their Secret History” (NewSouth Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Australian Gypsies: Their Secret History (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), award-winning writer Mandy Sayer explores the neglected history of Gypsies, or Romani people, in Australia, fr...

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Christine Yano, “Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This cat has a complicated history. In addition to filling stationery stores across the globe with cute objects festooned with little whiskers and bowties, Hello Kitty has inspired tributes from Li...

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

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

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Padraic Kenney, “Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea of being a “political prisoner” may seem timeless. If someone was imprisoned for his or her political beliefs, then that person is in some sense a “political prisoner.” Think of the Tower ...

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Joseph Nye, “Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era” (Princeton UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph Nye‘s latest book is Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era (Princeton University Press, 2013). Professor Nye is University Distinguished Professor and former dean of t...

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

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

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Monica Ricketts, “Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Monica Ricketts’ new book Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) presents readers with the connected histories of ...

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Tony Collins, “Sport in Capitalist Society: A Short History” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Throughout the centuries, in cultures around the world, people have played games. But it has only been in the modern age, in the last 250 years or so, that people have competed in and watched sport...

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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...

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Marie Grace Brown, “Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marie Grace Brown’s Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (Stanford University Press, 2017) is in many ways a history of fashion in Sudan, but in so many ways, its much mor...

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Chris Anderson and David Sally, “The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong” (Penguin, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Two guys are watching Premier League highlights, when onto the TV screen comes Rory Delap, then with Stoke City, doing one of his renowned throw-ins from the touchline directly into the box. One gu...

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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...

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Padraic Scanlan, “Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolutions” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What was the British abolition of the slave trade like in practice? Padraic Scanlan, in his beautifully-written first book, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revo...

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

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

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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 ...

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Nikhil Pal Singh, “Race and America’s Long War” (U. Cal Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the export of the Chicago Police Department’s interrogation experts to Iraq after 2003, to casual references of the US-Indian Wars by US soldiers in Vietnam, Race and America’s Long War (Unive...

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Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s getting warmer, there ain’t no doubt about it. What are we going to do? Most folks say we should cut back on bad things like carbon emissions. That would probably be a good idea. The trouble i...

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Jeremy Black, "Maps of War: Mapping Conflict through the Centuries" (Conway, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is little documented mapping of conflict prior to the Renaissance period, but, from the 17th century onward, military commanders and strategists began to document the wars in which they were ...

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Stephane Robolin, “Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing” (U. Illinois Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Writers have long created networks and connections by exchanging letters or writing back to one another in their poetry and fiction. Letters between Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Zo...

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

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

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Andrea Pitzer, "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps" (Little, Brown and Company, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrea Pitzer talks about her book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (Little, Brown and Company, 2017), one of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best History Books for 2017. While co...

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Roderic Broadhurst et.al., “Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The work of sociologist Norbert Elias has had a renaissance in recent times, with Steven Pinker, among others, using it to argue that interpersonal violence has declined globally as states have exp...

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Martin A. Miller, “The Foundations of Modern Terrorism” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Terrorism seems like the kind of thing that has existed since the beginning of states some 5,000 years ago. Understood in one, narrow way–as what we call “insurgency”–it probably has. But modern te...

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Rachel Laudan, "Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History" (U California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With Al Zambone this week is Rachel Laudan, author of the fascinating Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (University of California Press, 2015). Once a historian of science and technology...

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Pasquale Tridico, “Inequality in Financial Capitalism” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I was joined by Pasquale Tridico, Professor of Political Economy at Roma Tre University in Italy. His latest book, Inequality in Financial Capitalism, was published by Routledge in 2017. The issue ...

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Christian Caryl, “Strange Rebels:1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century” (Basic, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do Margaret Thatcher, Ayatollah Khomeini, Deng Xiaoping, and Pope John Paul II have in common? At first thought, you wouldn’t think much. But according to Christian Caryl, they were all radic...

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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...

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Jack Greene, “Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait” (UVA Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is the most recent work from distinguished historian Jack Greene. Using a treasure trove of records from the mid...

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James Q. Whitman, “The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Whitman wants to revise our understanding of warfare during the eighteenth century, the period described by my late colleague and friend Russell Weigley as the “Age of Battles.” We commonly v...

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Michael Mandelbaum, "The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford Univiersity Press, 2019), the eminent foreign policy scholar Mich...

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Lawrence R. Douglas, “The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press 2016), Lawrence R. Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurispr...

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Muzammil Hussain and Phillip Howard, “Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring” (Oxford UP 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Muzammil Hussain and Phillip Howard have authored Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013) which explores the role social media (Twitter, Facebook,...

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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 ...

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Sujatha Gidla, “Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her searing book Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), Sujatha Gidla traces her family’s history over four generations in ...

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Azar Gat, “Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I went to college long ago, everyone had to read Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). I think I read it in half-a-dozen classes. Today Marx is out. Benedict Anderson, however, is in. Y...

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Larry Diamond, "Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency" (Penguin, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Larry Diamond joins us this week to talk about the threat China’s model of authoritarian capitalism poses to liberal democracy in the United States and around the world. Economics drives politics, ...

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Jayne Persian, “Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (NewSouth Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), Jayne Persian, a Lecturer in History at the University of Southern Queensland, explores the ...

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Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, “American Umpire” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is there an “American Empire?” A lot of people on the Left say “yes.” Actually, a lot of people on the Right say “yes” too. But Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman says “no.” In her stimulating new treatment ...

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Henning Melber, "Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations, and the Decolonisation of Africa" (Hurst, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dag Hammarskjold was such a dynamic secretary-general that for years, the motto about him was simply “Leave it to Dag.” Only the second person to hold that post when he was elected, Hammarskjold di...

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Amanda Bidnall, “The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945-1965” (Liverpool UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Just after World War II, West Indians began moving to London in large numbers. The artists, writers, and musicians among them found a place to create, and they found ways to express their complex n...

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Arend Lijphart, “Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries” (Yale UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Arend Lijphart is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president of the America...

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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...

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Karen Ross, “Youth Encounter Programs in Israel: Pedagogy, Identity and Social Change” (Syracuse UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Youth Encounter Programs in Israel: Pedagogy, Identity and Social Change (Syracuse University Press, 2017), Karen Ross conducts an in-depth analysis of Jewish-Palestinian youth enc...

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Eliga Gould, “Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many Americans tend to think of 1776 as the year when the United States began making history on its own terms. That is simply untrue. Building on recent scholarship that challenges this assumption ...

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Thomas Hager, "Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine" (Abrams Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Behind every landmark drug is a story. It could be a researcher’s genius insight, a catalyzing moment in geopolitical history, a new breakthrough technology, or an unexpected but welcome side effec...

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Gregory Mann, “From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Non-Governmentality” (Cambridge UP, 2014). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we spoke to Gregory Mann about his book From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Non-Governmentality (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Gregory Mann investigates how the e...

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Keri E. Iyall Smith, “Sociology of Globalization: Cultures, Economies, and Politics” (Westview Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Globalization is one of those words we hear on an almost daily basis. The world today is interconnected in ways that would have been unimaginable even twenty years ago. It seems as if everyone know...

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Wendy Brown, "In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neoliberalism is one of those fuzzy words that can mean something different to everyone. Wendy Brown is one of the world’s leading scholars on neoliberalism and argue that a generation of neolibera...

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Reina Lewis, “Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Fashion is often dismissed as trivial, but Reina Lewis‘s Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Duke University Press, 2015) takes both it and what Muslims specifically wear and devotes and 3...

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Rachel Kleinfeld and Drew Sloan, “Let There Be Light: Electrifying the Developing World With Markets and Distributed Energy” (Truman Institute, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You wouldn’t know from the 2012 president race but the United States remains engaged in a fairly bloody conflict in Afghanistan. In addition to boots on the ground, we deploy scores of drones in Pa...

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

Wonderfully concise and very readable, A Brief History of Spain (Robinson, 2019), is perfect for travelers as well as the discerning reader. Professor of History at Exeter University Jeremy Black’s...

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Keren Weitzberg, “We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya” (Ohio UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Somalis have lived in Kenya for generations, in many cases since long before the founding of the country. Yet, Kenyan officials and citizens often perceive them as a dangerous and alien presence, w...

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Christian Gerlach, “Extremely Violent Societies in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if genocide scholars have been approaching the field the wrong way? When I first opened Extremely Violent Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2010), I was immedia...

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C. Strachan and L. Poloni-Staudinger, "Why Don?t Women Rule the World?: Understanding Women?s Civic and Political Choices" (Sage, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why Don?t Women Rule the World?: Understanding Women?s Civic and Political Choices (Sage, 2019) is a comprehensive and useful addition to the established literature on women and politics. This book...

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Andrew Copson, “Secularism: Politics, Religion, and Freedom” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Secularism is an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe. It is embodied in the conflict between secular republics—from the US to India—and the challenges...

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Nicole Hassoun, “Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Citizens of well-developed liberal democracies enjoy an unprecedented standard of living, while a staggering number of people worldwide live in unbelievable poverty. It seems obvious that the well-...

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Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, "No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement (Cornell University Press, 2018), Elizabeth Cullen Dunn describes in a very on point and straight forward way how displacement has ...

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Edin Hajdarpasic, “Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840-1914” (Cornell UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seemed that everyone wanted Bosnia in the late nineteenth century: Serbian and Croatian nationalists; Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim and Yugoslav movements. At the same time, they all felt frustratio...

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Clifford Bob, “The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Clifford Bob is the author of the new book The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (Cambridge University Press 2012). Bob is an associate professor of political science at Duquesne Un...

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Kim A. Wagner, "The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did a Danish historian wind up with a human skull from colonial India in his University of London office? Kim A. Wagner’s The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857(Oxford Un...

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Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski, “Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beer has been a part of human civilization dating back to its beginnings. In summarizing the role it has played over the millennia, Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski’s book Beeronomics: How Beer Expla...

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

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

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Timothy LeCain, "The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Timothy LeCain is an award-winning environmental historian whose past work has focused on the connections between open-pit copper mines, technology, and the natural world. LeCain's newest book The ...

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Ricardo D. Salvatore, “Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ricardo D. Salvatore‘s new book, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (Duke University Press, 2016) offers an alternative narrative on the origins of Latin American Stud...

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The NBS Summer Seminar: Understanding the Olympic Games from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 2012 London Olympics are here. To mark the event, New Books in Sports offers another of its occasional seminar episodes. And as with any great seminar, you’ll be eager to tell people what you...

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Seth J. Frantzman, "After Isis: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East" (Gefen, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The enterprise of journalism is in crisis. Today’s journalists face accusations of “fake news” on the one hand, and harassment, arrest, and even the murder of reporters on the other. At the same ti...

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Eric J. Pido, “Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The government of the Philippines has for decades encouraged its citizens to seek work abroad and send money back to the country in remittances. But in recent years it has increasingly sought to en...

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Timothy Grainey, “Beyond ‘Bend It Like Beckham’: The Global Phenomenon of Women’s Soccer” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Two days before this year’s Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich, the top two women’s clubs in Europe played on the same pitch, at Munich’s Olympic Stadium, in the final match o...

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Joy McCann, "Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean" (U New South Wales Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joy McCann discusses the great circumpolar ocean that surrounds Antarctica. McCann is the author of Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean (University of New South Wales Press, 2018). She is a h...

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Daromir Rudnyckyj and Filippo Osella, eds., “Religion and the Morality of the Market: Anthropological Perspectives” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been a widespread affirmation of economic ideologies that conceive the market as an autonomous sphere of human practice. In the wake of the 2008 fin...

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Jessica Teisch, “Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise” (UNC Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Teisch‘s new book Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) examines the ways that Californi...

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

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

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Ryan D. Enos, “The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ryan Enos is the author of The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Enos is associate professor of government at Harvard University. Scholars have lon...

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John Fox, “The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game” (HarperCollins, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are a lot of balls in my house. Baseballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, footballs, basketballs, volleyballs. We have Wiffle balls, Nerf balls, and Super Balls. My children and I occasionally u...

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Jay Sexton, "A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History" (Basic Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A popular myth in the American nationalist imaginary is that the country has been on a continued path of progress. Another is that the country’s history has been the self-realization of the princip...

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Mya Guranieri Jaradat, “The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others” (U. Chicago/Pluto Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others (University of Chicago/Pluto Press, 2017), Mya Guarnieri-Jaradat offers her readers an intimate, often devastatingly gloomy portrait of the lives o...

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Phil Zuckerman, “Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment” (New York University Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is not uncommon for many Americans to believe that morality and order comes from God and religion. A society without these elements would consequently be immoral and chaotic. When Phil Zuckerman...

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Michael Kodas, "Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the 1980s, fires burned an average of two million acres per year. Today the average is eight million acres and growing. Scientists believe that we could see years with twenty million acres burne...

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Walter Scheidel, “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2017 half of the world’s wealth belongs to the top 1% of the population. In his new book, The Great Leveler Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century ...

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Marshall Poe, “A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is not every historian who would offer readers an attempt to explain human nature. In A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge Unive...

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James Tharin Bradford, "Poppies, Power, and Politics: Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Afghanistan and the United States have a complicated relationship. And poppies have often been at the center of the problem between the two countries. In James Tharin Bradford's new book, Poppies, ...

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Ronnie Perelis, “Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith” (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith (Indiana University Press, 2016), Ronnie Perelis, Chief Rabbi Dr. Isaac Abraham and Jelena (Rachel) Alcalay Chair and Associate Professor ...

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Peter Millward, “The Global Football League: Transnational Networks, Social Movements and Sport in the New Media Age” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s the English Premier League’s birthday! On this day twenty years ago, all twenty-two clubs of the First Division resigned from the 104-year-old Football League and declared their plans to crea...

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Michael Beckley, "Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The United States has been the world's dominant power for more than a century. Now many analysts and commentators believe that other countries such as China are rising and the United States is in d...

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Hugh Urban, “Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement” (U. Cal Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many contemporary spiritual movements are characterized by denial of material pleasures, subjugation of the self, and focus on transcendence. A spiritual program that cultivates embodied satisfacti...

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Niamh Reilly, “Women’s Human Rights: Seeking Gender Justice in a Globalizing Age” (Polity Press, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today, you can open your newspaper and find stories about mass rape in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, death sentences for adulterous women in Iran, or Central American women smuggled ...

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Mike Jay, "Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychedelics are not terribly new. And the drug mescaline is certainly not new. Mike Jay's new book, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (Yale University Press, 2019), tells two tr...

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Michael Wintroub, “The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you are an enthusiast of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), The Great Cat Massacre (1984), or The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), then Michael Wintroub‘s The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledg...

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Andrei Markovits, “Gaming the World: How Sports Are Shaping Global Politics and Culture” (Princeton UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“We live in the age of globalization, with the interconnection of markets, technology, and cultures making the world a smaller place.” Sure.Tell that to the guys on my local sports radio show. For...

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Stefan Al, "Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies" (Island Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn...

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Cyrus Schayegh, “The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The question of how to write the history of the modern Middle East is a much contested one. Do we write national histories, focused on modern-nation states? Do we treat the Middle East as an integr...

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Dave Zirin, “The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment that Changed the World” (Haymarket Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are beautiful sports photos, and dramatic sports photos. There are sports photos that are funny, and others that are poignant. There are photos that capture athletic brilliance, and tenacity,...

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Daniel Vukovich, "Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People's Republic of China" (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People's Republic of China (Palgrave, 2018) by Daniel Vukovich analyzes the 'intellectual political culture' of post-Tiananmen China in comparison ...

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Jane McCabe, “Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Jane McCabe, Lecturer in the Department of History and Art History at the Universit...

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Robert Thurston, “Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective” (Ashgate, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall of lynching in the United States. That orthodoxy holds that lynching in the South was a ‘system of social control’ in...

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Martin Edwards, "The IMF, the WTO and the Politics of Economic Surveillance" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) practice periodic surveillance of member states to ensure they are adopting effective economic policies. Despite th...

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Alessandro Duranti, “The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, where he served as Dean of Social Sciences from 2009-2016. In his book The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of ...

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Anthony Penna, “The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of “Big History” is that the distinction between geologic time and human time has collapsed in our era. The forces that drove geologic time...

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Hannah Weiss Muller, "Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is no denying that the public remains fascinated with monarchy. In the United Kingdom, the royal family commands the headlines, but paradoxically they are distant and knowable all at once. Th...

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Christopher R. Cotter and David G. Robertson, eds., “After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When undergraduate students look through a course catalog and see the title World Religions they probably have some idea what the course will be about. But why is that? Why do World Religions seem ...

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Ricardo Duchesne, “The Uniqueness of Western Civilization” (Brill, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the standard assumptions of modern Western social science (history included) is that material conditions drive historical development. All of the “Great Transitions” in world history–the ori...

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Jeremy Friedman, "Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If today’s geopolitical fragmentation and the complexities of a ‘multipolar’ world order have led some to reminisce about the apparent stability of the Cold War era’s two ‘camps’, it should be reme...

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Asher Orkaby, “Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The civil war in Yemen today harkens back to a similar conflict half a century ago, when the overthrow of the ruling imam, Muhammad al-Badr, in 1962 sparked a conflict that dragged on for the rest ...

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Francis Fukuyama, “The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution” (FSG, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the book Montesquieu reduces a set of disparate, seemingly unconnected facts arrayed over centuries and contine...

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Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov, "Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The practice of Partition understood as the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states is often regarded as a successful political "solution" to ethnic c...

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Jocelyn Olcott, “International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-raising Event in History” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jocelyn Olcott is an associate professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her book International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-raising Event in ...

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Dan Drezner, “Theories of International Politics and Zombies” (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

International theorists like to game out every possible scenario. What would happen if you applied their methodology to dealing with the fictional public policy challenge of a zombie infestation? ...

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Donald Stoker, "Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this provocative challenge to United States policy and strategy, former Professor of Strategy & Policy at the US Naval War College, and author or editor of eleven books, Dr. Donald Stoker argues...

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Ernesto Bassi, “An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Where is the Caribbean? In An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Duke University Press, 2017) Ernesto Bassi makes the case for a transim...

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David Day, “Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

People will often say that “this land”–wherever this land happens to be–is theirs because their ancestors “have always lived there.” But you can be pretty sure that’s not true. It’s probably the ca...

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

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

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Michael Allan, “In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he argues that the d...

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Joyce Appleby, “The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism” (Norton, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting...

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Tiffany Gill, "To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism" (U Illinois Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Annette Joseph-Gabriel talks with Tiffany Gill about the history of African American travel in the late twentieth century and its significance to Black communities across the lines of class and gen...

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Carla Pestana, “The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carla Pestana’s new book The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a rousing look at a transformative moment in Caribbean history. Pestan...

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Fred Spier, “Big History and the Future of Humanity” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

My son Isaiah likes to play the “why” game. Isaiah: “Why is my ice cream gone?” Me: “Because you ate it.” Isaiah: “Why did I eat it?” Me: “Because you need food.” Isaiah: “Why do I need food?” And ...

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Richard Vague, "A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Vague really really cares about private-sector debt. And he thinks you should too. In A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)...

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Alejandra Mancilla, “The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are accustomed to the thought that individuals facing dire circumstances may rightfully take use of others’ property in order to save their own lives. For example, one thinks it obvious that in ...

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Azar Gat, “War in Human Civilization” (Oxford UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason ...

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

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

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Jatinder Mann, “The Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s” (Peter Lang, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s (Peter Lang Publishing, 2016), Jatinder Mann, an assistant professor of hi...

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

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

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Bhakti Shringarpure, "Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bhakti Shringarpure has written a fascinating, multidimensional analysis of the Cold War and decolonization and the often-under-explored connections between these events. In her book, Cold War Asse...

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Maria Montoya, et. al, eds. “Global Americans: A History of the United States” (Wadsworth Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

America’s national experience and collective history have always been subject to transnational forces and affected by global events and conditions. In recognition of this reality, the textbook Glob...

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

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

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Yuen Yuen Ang, "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap" (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I spoke with Dr Yuen Yuen Ang, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She published in 2016 a great new book How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell ...

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Bruce O’Neill, “The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order” (Duke University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017) Bruce O’Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downwar...

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Ben Kiernan, “Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur” (Yale UP, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chimps, our closest relatives, kill each other. But chimps do not engage in anything close to mass slaughter of their own kind. Why is this? There are two possible explanations for the difference. ...

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Jeffrey Lantis, "Foreign Policy Advocacy and Entrepreneurship: How a New Generation in Congress Is Shaping U.S. Engagement with the World" (U Michigan Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With the US in the midst of on-going negotiations with Iran, North Korea, and China, how is Congress playing a part? How is the new generation of Congress advocating for and against US action? Jeff...

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Kief Hillsbery, “Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kief Hillsbery‘s Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) follows the career of Nigel Halleck, an English tax assessor in employ of...

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Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, “Natural Experiments of History” (Harvard UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I remember telling my wife, the mathematician, that historians typically work on one time and place their entire careers. If you begin, say, as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (as I did), you ar...

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Darren Dochuk, "Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (Basic Books, 2019) places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, fr...

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

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

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Julian E. Zelizer, “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From WWII to the War on Terrorism” (Basic Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to forget the “public” part and concentrate on the “...

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Joan Wallach Scott, "Sex and Secularism" (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joan Wallach Scott’s contributions to the history of women and gender, and to feminist theory, will be familiar to listeners across multiple disciplines. Her latest book, Sex and Secularism (Prince...

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Dana Mills, “Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries” (Manchester University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dance & Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries (Manchester University Press, 2017) by Dana Mills, considers dance as a political expression from a number of perspectives, situating the analysis within ...

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

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

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Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2008-04-18T19:33:10

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus o...

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Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2008-04-18T19:33:10

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus o...

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Podcasts by New Books in World Affairs

All episodes

Border Lines: Refugees and the International Order from 2023-02-02T09:00

On "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" from 2022-09-22T08:00

Susanna P. Campbell, "Global Governance and Local Peace: Accountability and Performance in International Peacebuilding" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

Jack Greene and Philip Morgan, “Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sasha D. Pack, "The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susanna Forrest, “The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lawrence Wittner, “Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement” (Stanford UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan D. T. Ward, "China's Vision of Victory" (Atlas Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ronald A. Lindsay, “The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can’t Tell Us What to Do” (Pitchstone Publishing, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

Tobias Straumann, "1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Leonard Grob and John Roth, “Losing Trust in the World: Holocaust Scholars Confront Torture,” (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Godfrey Hodgson, “The Myth of American Exceptionalism” (Yale UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tim Bouverie, "Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War" (Tim Duggan Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jorge Duany, “Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gregory Cochran, “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” (Basic, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

Rajan Gurukkal, “Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carl Bon Tempo, “Americans at the Gates: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War” (Princeton UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer Hubbert, "China in the World: An Anthropology of Confucius Institutes, Soft Power, and Globalization" (U Hawaii Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Or Rosenboim, “The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ian McNeely, “Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet” (Norton, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristen R. Ghodsee, "Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

Walter Moss, “An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth Century Global Forces” (Anthem Press, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stacy Fahrenthold, "Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Bryant,” A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the Present,” (Bloomsbury, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Fennell, "Fighting the People's War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Hollander, “From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Heidi Tworek, "News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

Mark Peterson, "The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace" (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

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

Phil Gurski, “Western Foreign Fighters: The Threat to Homeland and International Security” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

Robert Jervis, “How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bonita Mersiades, "Whatever It Takes: The Inside Story of the FIFA Way" (Powderhouse Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tony Collins, “The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby” (Bloomsbury, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian A. Jackson, "Practical Terrorism Prevention" (RAND Corporation, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

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

Phoebe Chow, “Britain’s Imperial Retreat from China, 1900-1931” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Miller, "Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World" (FSG, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David F. Lancy, “The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Pat Leary, "Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism" (Haymarket Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian T. Edwards, “After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Crossland, "War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853-1914" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ryan Muldoon, “Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

Raphael Dalleo, “American Imperialisms Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anti-colonialism” (UVa Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy Black, "War and its Causes" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Iza Hussin, “The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, "How Democracies Die" (Crown, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Laura Madokoro, “Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Martin Collins, "A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Terry Nichols Clark, “The Third Sector: Community Organizations, NGOs, and Nonprofits” (U. Illinois Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

F. Grillo and R. Nanetti, "Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Jean So, “Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network” (Columbia University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

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

Chris Miller, “The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy” (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kimberly Chong, "Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Best New Books in Political Science 2016: International Politics Edition” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Max Edelson, "The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence" (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marc Sageman, “Misunderstanding Terrorism” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Henry Kissinger and Winston Lord, "Kissinger on Kissinger: Reflections on Diplomacy, Grand Strategy, and Leadership" (All Points Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Coll Thrush, “Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lindsey N. Kingston, "Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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

Michael A. Cohen, "Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393