In Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scholars in both mediaeval and translation studies to rethink how ideas and texts circulated in the mediaeval world. Whereas many view translators as mere conduits of authorial intention, Dr. Stahuljak proposes a new perspective rooted in a term from journalism: the fixer. With this language, Dr. Stahuljak captures the diverse, active roles mediaeval translators and interpreters played as mediators of entire cultures—insider informants, local guides, knowledge brokers, art distributors, and political players. Fixers offers nothing less than a new history of literature, art, translation, and social exchange from the perspective not of the author or state but of the fixer. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functionalism.” Recruited by federal construction and research programs for institutional reform and expansion—which included hospitals, mental health centers, prisons, and public housing—architects theorized new ways to control behavior and make it more functional by exercising soft power, or power through persuasion, with their designs. In the 1960s –1970s era of anti-institutional sentiment, they hoped to offer an enlightened, palatable, more humane solution to larger social problems related to health, mental health, justice, and security of the population by applying psychological expertise to institutional design. In turn, Knoblauch argues, architects gained new roles as researchers, organizers, and writers while theories of confinement, territory, and surveillance proliferated. The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America (University of Pittsburgh Press) explores psychological functionalism as a political tool and the architectural projects funded by a postwar nation in its efforts to govern, exert control over, and ultimately pacify its patients, prisoners, and residents. Joy Knoblauch is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, where she teaches history and theory of architecture as an exploration of architecture's engagement with politics and science. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Shadows. Smoke. Dark alleys. Rain-slicked city streets. These are iconic elements of film noir visual style. Long after its 1940s heyday, noir hallmarks continue to appear in a variety of new media forms and styles. What has made the noir aesthetic at once enduring and adaptable? Sheri Chinen Biesen's Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style (Columbia UP, 2024) explores how the dark cinematic noir style has evolved across eras, from classic Hollywood to present-day streaming services. Examining both aesthetics and material production conditions, she demonstrates how technological and industrial changes have influenced the imagery of film noir.  Biesen considers the persistence of the noir legacy, discussing how neo-noirs reimagine iconic imagery and why noir style has become a touchstone in the streaming era. Drawing on a wealth of archival research, she provides insightful analyses of a wide range of works, from masterpieces directed by Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock to New Hollywood neo-noirs, the Coen brothers' revisionist films, and recent HBO and Netflix series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish emigrant to the United States, an author, professor and political philosopher. Born in 1899 in Kirchhain in the Kingdom of Prussia to an observant Jewish family, Strauss received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1921, and began his scholarly work in the 1920s, as well as participating in the German Zionist movement. In 1932, a recommendation letter from the jurist and later Nazi party member Carl Schmitt enabled Strauss to leave Germany on a Rockefeller Foundation grant, shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power. Strauss continued his work in France and England before settling in the United States in 1937, teaching at the New School and other colleges, and then becoming professor of political science at the University of Chicago in 1949. It is in America that Strauss wrote his most famous works, including Persecution and the Art of Writing, On Tyranny, Natural Right and History, The City and Man, What Is Political Philosophy?, and many other works. His work typically takes the form of interpretations of ancient authors, especially Plato.  Over the years, Strauss attracted many dedicated students, who became known as “Straussians,” spreading his influence not only within academia but eventually into the American government. Straussians would attain such prominence and eventually cause such controversy, that, decades after Strauss’ death, the field of political science was gripped by what would become known as “the Strauss wars.” Strauss wrote in a difficult, densely layered and evasive style that has led to long-lasting disputes about whether his apparent endorsement of liberal democracy was genuine, or whether his work contains an esoteric teaching about human hierarchies, one that might justify illiberal and anti-democratic Machiavellian coups. Heightening the urgency of figuring out what Strauss truly stood for is the widespread view that Straussians who worked in the State Department and Defense Department and who came to be called “Neoconservatives” were instrumental in launching the Iraq war in 2003, and are otherwise associated with hawkish, not to say hubristic and imperial U.S. foreign policy. But, leaving the neocons aside; Leo Strauss, Jewish Nazi? Could such a charge possibly be fair? Who is the real Leo Strauss? These are the questions that bring us to this author and this book. William Henry Furness Altman is a retired public high school teacher and author of many articles and books on figures including Plato, Cicero, Plotinus, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and indeed, Leo Strauss.  The book we are discussing today is entitled The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lexington Books, 2010). William Altman’s first published book is an extensively researched and exhaustively footnoted work substantiating his charge that Leo Strauss, the revered and influential Jewish emigre, and recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, did indeed harbor a lifelong commitment to the principles of Nazi ideology and that such indeed is Strauss’ secret teaching. Joseph Liss is an independent scholar based in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. His studies focus on ancient religion, philosophy, political theory, critical theory, and history. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today I talked to Will Grant about his book Populista: The Rise of Latin America's 21st Century Strongman (Bloomsbury, 2021). or more than six decades, Fidel Castro's words have echoed through the politics of Latin America. His towering political influence still looms over the region today. The swing to the Left in Latin America, known as the 'Pink Tide', was the most important political movement in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century. It involved some of the biggest, most colorful and most controversial characters in Latin America for decades, leaders who would leave an indelible mark on their nations and who were adored and reviled in equal measure. Parties became secondary to individual leaders and populism reigned from Venezuela to Brazil, from Central America to the Caribbean, financed by a spike in commodity prices and the oil-backed largesse of Venezuela's charismatic socialist president, Hugo Chávez.  Yet within a decade and a half, it was all over. Today, this wave of populism has left the Americas in the hands of some of the most authoritarian and dangerous leaders since the military dictatorships of the 1970s. Will Grant is one of the UK's leading broadcast journalists on Latin American affairs. He has been a BBC correspondent in Latin America since 2007 with successive deployments to Venezuela, Mexico and Cuba. Across his career, he has been responsible for covering the region from Patagonia to the Rio Grande and has traveled to every part of the continent in that time. He is currently based in Havana and Mexico City. Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State (Faber & Faber, 2024) offers a lively, new and sweeping history of the rise of the state in Plantagenet England. Between 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two centuries witnessed savage political blood-letting - including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords - as well as international warfare, devastating national pandemic, economic crisis and the first major peasant uprising in English history. Arise, England uses the six Plantagenet kings who ruled during these two centuries to explore England's emergent statehood. Drawing on original accounts and arresting new research, it draws resonances between government, international relations, and the abilities, egos and ambitions of political actors, then and now. Colourful and complicated, and by turns impressive and hateful, the six kings stride through the story; but arguably the greatest character is the emerging English state itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A perpetual tension exists between history and change, which is an issue long explored by historians and social scientists. Reckoning with Change in Yucatán: Histories of Care and Threat on a Former Hacienda (Routledge, 2023) engages with how best to look upon and respond to change, arguing that this debate is an important arena for negotiating local belonging and a force of transformation in its own right. For residents of Chunchucmil, a historic rural community in Yucatán, Mexico, history is anything but straightforward. Living in what is both a defunct 19th-century hacienda estate and a vibrant Catholic pilgrimage site, Chunchucmileños reckon past, present, and future in radically different ways. For example, while some use the aging estate buildings to weave a history of economic decline and push for revitalization by hotel developers, others highlight the growing fame of the Virgin of the Rosary in the attached church and vow to defend the site from developer interference.  By exploring how past and future are channeled through changing built environments, landscapes, sacred relics, and legal documents, this ethnographic study details how the politics of change provide Chunchucmileños with a common language for debating commitments to place and each another in the present. Against Western notions of ‘History’ as a relatively coherent account of change, Jason Ramsey suggests we reframe it as an ongoing performance that is always fractured, democratic, and morally tinged. Jason Ramsey is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. Based on fieldwork in Yucatan among former plantation laborers, he publishes on topics such as semiotics, ruination, value, and the anthropology of history. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today I talked to Philip Freeman about his new book Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor (Yale UP, 2023). Flavius Claudius Julianus, or Julian the Apostate, ruled Rome as sole emperor for just a year and a half, from 361 to 363, but during that time he turned the world upside down. Although a nephew of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome, Julian fought to return Rome to the old gods who had led his ancestors to build their vast empire. As emperor, Julian set about reforming the administration, conquering new territories, and reviving ancient religions. He was scorned in his time for repudiating Christianity and demonized as an apostate for willfully rejecting Christ. Through the centuries, Julian has been viewed by many as a tragic figure who sought to save Rome from its enemies and the corrupting influence of Christianity. Christian writers and historians have seen Julian much differently: as a traitor to God and violent oppressor of Christians. Had Julian not been killed by a random Persian spear, he might well have changed all of history. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review Philip Freeman is the author of over twenty books and is Fletcher Jones Chair of Western Culture, and Professor of Humanities at Pepperdine University Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

At the beginning of the twentieth century, for many English men and women of Welsh origin the idea of being in some part 'Welsh' reaffirmed their own understanding of what it meant to 'be British'. Wales in England, 1914-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wendy Ugolini is the first cultural history of this English Welsh duality - an identification with two constituent nations at once - and explores how 'Welshness' was imagined, performed, and mobilised in England during and between the two world wars. In so doing, and making use of individual English Welsh case studies from the worlds of politics, art, literature, and soldiering, the book provides a wholly new perspective on the social, cultural, and military history of Britain at war. It shows English-Welsh duality to have been an important strand of pluralistic Britishness in wartime, and that this diasporic construction of Welshness held a wide urban appeal with significant implications for military enlistment, cultural production, and commemorative practices in England. Working at the intersection of war studies, British studies, and diaspora studies, Wales in England makes a significant contribution to 'four nations' history and the history of British society at war. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Americans agree that their nation’s origins lie in the Revolution, but they have never agreed on what the Revolution meant. For nearly two hundred and fifty years, politicians, political parties, social movements, and a diverse array of ordinary Americans have constantly reimagined the Revolution to fit the times and suit their own agendas. In The Memory of '76: The Revolution in American History (Yale UP, 2024), Michael D. Hattem reveals how conflicts over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution—including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—have influenced the most important events and tumultuous periods in the nation’s history; how African Americans, women, and other oppressed groups have shaped the popular memory of the Revolution; and how much of our contemporary memory of the Revolution is a product of the Cold War. By exploring the Revolution’s unique role in American history as a national origin myth, Hattem shows how the meaning of the Revolution has never been fixed, how remembering the nation’s founding has often done far more to divide Americans than to unite them, and how revising the past is an important and long‑standing American political tradition. This interview was conducted by Hannah Nolan, a PhD Candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work focuses upon the intersection of memory, partisanship, and ethnic identity during the early republic to explore the construction of Irish and American identities in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, prominent independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar circulated a Facebook petition signed first by hundreds of his cultural and journalistic contacts and then by thousands of others. That act led to a new law in Russia criminalizing criticism of the war, and Zygar fled Russia. In his time as a journalist, Zygar has interviewed President Zelensky and had access to many of the major players--from politicians to oligarchs. As an expert on Putin's moods and behavior, he has spent years studying the Kremlin's plan regarding Ukraine, and here, in clear, chronological order he explains how we got here. In 1996 to 2004, Ukraine became an independent post-Soviet country where everyone was connected to the former empire at all levels, financially, culturally, psychologically. However, the elite anticipated that the empire would be back and punish them. From 2004 to 2018, there were many states inside one state, each with its own rulers/oligarchs and its own interests--some of them directly connected with Russia. In 2018, a new generation of Ukrainians arrive, and having grown in an independent country, they do not consider themselves to be part of Russia--and that was the moment when the war began, as Putin could not tolerate losing Ukraine forever. Authoritative, timely, and vitally important, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Scribner, 2023) is an unique overview of the war that continues to threaten the future of the entire world as we know it. Mikhail Zygar, a journalist, filmmaker, and public historian, was founding editor-in-chief in 2010 of Russia’s only independent news TV channel, Dozhd (TVRain), which provided an alternative to Kremlin-controlled state television and gave a platform to opposition voices. He was also the founder and editor-in-chief of Project 1917, a website revisiting the Russian Revolution through myriad eye-witness perspectives. The New York Times has described Zygar as “one of Russia’s smartest and best-sourced young journalists.” Winner of the International Press Freedom Award in 2014, Zygar is the author of All the Kremlin’s Men (2016), the #1 bestseller in Russia that has been translated into over twenty languages, and The Empire Must Die (2017), a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year. Zygar openly protested against the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and then left Russia. He reported on the atrocities committed by Russian armed forces against Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha in 2022 and was charged with “distributing false information about Russia’s military.” In 2023 he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 8.5 years in prison. He has written for based Der Spiegel in Germany and The New York Times in the USA and writes a substack newsletter, “The Last Pioneer.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

As the author of a graphic history, I loved chatting with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Paul Peart-Smith about the graphic interpretation of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2024). An Indigenous Peoples' History of The United States originally came out in 2014 with Beacon Press. In 2019 it was adapted into a Young Peoples version by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese. In 2021 it was one of the three foundational texts for the amazing HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck. The other featured books were two of my all-time favorites Sven Lindqvist’ Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Paul Peart-Smith has adapted what many regard as the first history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples into a stunningly powerful graphic history. Through evocative full color artwork, renowned cartoonist Paul Peart-Smith brings this watershed book to life, centering the perspective of the peoples displaced by Europeans and their white descendants to trace Indigenous perseverance over four centuries against policies intended to obliterate them. Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a New York Times best-selling author, grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming family. She has been active in the international feminist and Indigenous movements for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. Dunbar-Ortiz is the winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and is the author or editor of many books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. She lives in San Francisco and is a professor emeritus in Ethnic Studies at California State University, East Bay. Paul Peart-Smith is a celebrated cartoonist of over 35 years, with experience in concept art, graphic design, and animation. Having studied to be an illustrator in Cambridge, England, he has worked on comics for 2000 AD, such as Slaughter Bowl . He is the illustrator and adapter of W. E. B. Du Bois Souls of Black Folk: A Graphic Interpretation. He lives in Tasmania, Australia and puts out the bi-weekly newsletter InkSkull . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Two strangers meet in a trapped elevator. One is an archaeologist, the other isn’t. A simple question, ‘What do you do?’, becomes the springboard for a dialogue that weaves a fascinating tale. In How to Fit All of Ancient Greece in an Elevator (William Collins, 2024) archaeologist Dr. Theodore Papakostas takes us on a spectacularly iconoclastic and hugely engrossing journey through ancient Greece, from its beginnings in prehistory to its end. Marvelling at the exalted moments in history as well as the more mundane, Dr. Papakostas introduces the reader to countless fascinating stories about the cradle of western civilisation – many of which upend received wisdom about the empire as well as about archaeology itself. Along the way, he settles questions such as: What did a Minoan princess pack for a trip to Egypt? How did a raunchy dance lead to the birth of Democracy? Why did Heraclitus suggest that Homer should be slapped? A whistle-stop tour through three hundred years of Greek history, How to Fit All of Ancient Greece in an Elevator is an unforgettable love letter to the treasures we’ve inherited from the ancient world, as well as to those who have helped us unearth them. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940–1960 (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers a new history of the partition. Based on previously unexamined archives and rare films, it investigates key questions around film production, partition and the provenance of the nation in South Asia: How did partition transform the dynamic and transcultural film industry of undivided India? What has been the relationship between Pakistani and Indian Cinema? Could the cinematic rendition of Pakistan have preceded its territorial realisation? Focussing on the unravelling of artistic and economic ties between two formerly intimate film cities of colonial India, Bombay and Lahore, this book follows their transition into the nationally discrete production centres of independent India and Pakistan. Pursuing inflections, migrations and shifts across national lines, Evacuee Cinema explains how filmmaking interpreted national danger and examines the expulsion and rehabilitation that went into the making of ‘Indian’ and ‘Pakistani’ cinema. Dr Salma Siddique is research faculty at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, specializing in South Asian popular cinema, Islamicate screen cultures and immigrant media. Her research has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Third Text, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is a core editor at BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, published by Sage. Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. Her interdisciplinary academic interests lie at the intersection of social media and internet studies, platforms and film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Unlike a flood or fire, a the Farming Crisis of the 1980s did not have a set beginning of ending. Rather, it was a rolling, often invisible, disaster that could be easy to ignore if you lived in towns or cities, even within the West and Midwest. Yet, in places like rural Iowa, the impacts of this complex crisis were devastating and indeed, ongoing even today.  In When a Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa, and the Farm Crisis of the 1980s (UP of Kansas, 2022), emininet Iowa State historian Pamela Riney-Kehrberg explains the roots, details, and impacts of the farm crisis on 1970s and 1980s Iowa. Riney-Kehrberg focuses in particular on the mental and psychological effects of this slow disaster on family farmers themselves, with an emphasis on the psychic damage caused by farm closure which contributed to a rash of murders, suicides, and mental health crises across the state. Among the first book-length studies of the 1980s Farm Crisis, When a Dream Dies shows how the disconnect between rural and urban America was both caused, and deepened, in the crucible of debt, banking, and bankrupt farms during the Reagan years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What role does religion play in migration processes? What is the reason behind migration of religious minorities? Is religious affiliation a deciding factor in choosing emigration?  Some of these questions have been the focus of The Untold Journey of the Nazarene Emigration from Yugoslavia to North America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). As the field of migration history is very broad both chronologically and geographically, Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović focuses on the migration of religious minorities triggered by state repression and the socio-historical context of post-Second World War Yugoslavia. The history and development of the Nazarene communities is analyzed through the lens of religiously motivated persecution and migration from Yugoslavia to North America.  The Nazarenes, known as Apostolical Christian Church (Nazarene) in North America, represents a fascinating case study which bring new insights into policies towards minority religions during the communist era, migration patterns, and integration mechanisms in the host country. This book is applicable to contemporary forced migration contexts and to the role of religious communities in supporting the integration of refugees and migrants across the world. The reasons for fleeing, migration paths, and routes, life in the refugee camps and settling into the new society are present in the narratives of present-day refugees and migrants fleeing from conflict or religious intolerance across the globe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Dive into the world of animals with Whitney Barlow Robles in her captivating new book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History (Yale UP, 2023). Can corals truly build worlds? Do rattlesnakes possess a mystical charm? What secrets do raccoons hold? These questions reflect how animals have historically challenged human attempts to control nature, particularly during the Enlightenment—a time marked by rigid classifications, colonial exploitation, and the complex interplay between humans and the natural world. Robles takes us on a journey through four distinct ecological zones: the ocean, underground, curiosity cabinets, and the field. Her exploration reveals a forgotten lineage of empirical inquiry that embraces uncertainty and highlights the tumultuous history of human-animal encounters. This legacy continues to influence modern biologists and ecologists today as they strive to understand the intricate lives of animals. In a unique blend of history and nature writing, Robles alternates between meticulous research and personal narratives, uncovering the animal foundations of human knowledge. She argues that addressing our current environmental crisis requires us to reflect on the past and recognize the vital roles animals play in shaping our understanding of the world. Join us as we explore the unruly protagonists of 18th-century science and discover why the stories of these creatures are essential to navigating the challenges we face today. Gloria Maritza Gómez Revuelta is a Doctoral candidate at El Colegio de México and Adjunct Lecturer at the Universidad de Guadalajara (UdeG). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most indigenous elites tended to possess religious, ethnic, or status-based identities rather than national identities. Why then did the desires of a typically small number result in wave after wave of new states? The answer has customarily centred on the actions of "nationalists" against weakening empires during a time of proliferating beliefs that "peoples" should control their own destiny. Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Lynn M. Tesser upends conventional wisdom by demonstrating that nationalism often existed more in the perceptions of external observers than of local activists and insurgents. Dr. Tesser adds nuance to scholarship that assumes most, if not all, pre-independence unrest was nationalist and separatist, and sheds light on why the various demands for change eventually coalesced around independence in some cases but not others. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Paul Robeson's Voices (Oxford UP, 2023) is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage examines Robeson's voice as it exists in two broad and intersecting domains: as sound object and sounding gesture, specifically how it was fashioned in the contexts of singing practices, in recital, concert, and recorded performance, and as subject of identification. Olwage asks: how does the voice encapsulate modes of subjectivity, of being? Combining deep archival research with musicological theory, this book is a study of voice as central to Robeson's sense of self and his politics. Paul Robeson's Voices charts the dialectal process of Robeson's vocal and self-discovery, documenting some of the ways Robeson's practice revised the traditions of concert singing in the first half of the twentieth century and how his voice manifested as resistance.” Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Macau was supposed to be a sleepy post for John Reeves, the British consul for the Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast. He arrived, alone, in June 1941, his wife and daughter left behind in China. Seven months later, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, invaded Hong Kong, and made Reeves the last remaining British diplomat for hundreds of miles, responsible for refugees streaming in from China. Peter Rose uses Reeves as a jumping off point for his newest work of historical fiction, The Good War of Consul Reeves (Blacksmith Books, 2024). Using Reeves’ own unpublished memoir and research in the national archives, Peter tells a tale of how Reeves—a largely unremarkable man—managed to hold things together in the Portuguese colony until Japan’s defeat in 1945. Peter Rose is a graduate of the George Washington University and the Yale Law School. He first practiced law in Washington DC. It was during a posting in Hong Kong with Goldman Sachs as its Asian Head of Public Affairs that he started to visit Macau and became fascinated with the story of this incongruous piece of Portugal on the edge of China. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Good War of Consul Reeves. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Isaac Nakhimovsky reveals the Enlightenment origins of this post-Napoleonic initiative, explaining why it was embraced at first by many contemporary liberals as the birth of a federal Europe and the dawning of a peaceful and prosperous age of global progress. Examining how the Holy Alliance could figure as both an idea of progress and an emblem of reaction, Dr. Nakhimovsky offers a novel vantage point on the history of federative alternatives to the nation state. The result is a clearer understanding of the recurring appeal of such alternatives—and the reasons why the politics of federation has also come to be associated with entrenched resistance to liberalism’s emancipatory aims. Dr. Nakhimovsky connects the history of the Holy Alliance with the better-known transatlantic history of eighteenth-century constitutionalism and nineteenth-century efforts to abolish slavery and war. He also shows how the Holy Alliance was integrated into a variety of liberal narratives of progress. From the League of Nations to the Cold War, historical analogies to the Holy Alliance continued to be drawn throughout the twentieth century, and Nakhimovsky maps how some of the fundamental political problems raised by the Holy Alliance have continued to reappear in new forms under new circumstances. Time will tell whether current assessments of contemporary federal systems seem less implausible to future generations than initial liberal expectations of the Holy Alliance do to us today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The history of monasticism in early Ireland is dominated by its flourishing during the sixth and seventh centuries, a period dominated by Columba of Iona and Columbanus of Bobbio, and later by the 'reform' spearheaded by Malachy of Armagh during the twelfth century. But what of monasticism in Ireland during the intervening period? Regarded as different from ' mainstream' Anglo-Saxon and continental monasticism, monastic life in Ireland has not been fully understood in scholarly discussions about the existence of distinct ' monasticisms' throughout Christianity.  The Irish sources, many written in the vernacular, are not accessible and are viewed as unconventional. The secularization of monasticism in Ireland has overshadowed evidence for a thriving lived monasticism. Edel Bhreathnach's book Monasticism in Ireland, AD 900-1250 (Four Courts Press, 2024) concentrates on those men and women who followed a monastic life, especially between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, and who maintained a universal monastic ideology while incorporating monasticism into their own cultural environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Roswell, 1947. Washington, DC, 1952. Quarouble, 1954. New Hampshire, 1961. Pascagoula, 1973. Petrozavodsk, 1977. Copley Woods, 1983. Explore how sightings of UFOs and aliens seized the world's attention and discover what the fascination with flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitors says about our changing views on science, technology, and the paranormal. In the summer of 1947, a private pilot flying over the state of Washington saw what he described as several pie pan-shaped aircraft traveling in formation at remarkably high speed. Within days, journalists began referring to the objects as "flying saucers." Over the course of that summer, Americans reported seeing them in the skies overhead. News quickly spread, and within a few years, flying saucers were being spotted across the world. The question on everyone's mind was, what were they? Some new super weapon in the Cold War? Strange weather patterns? Optical illusions? Or perhaps it was all a case of mass hysteria? Some, however, concluded they could only be one thing: spacecrafts built and piloted by extraterrestrials. The age of the unidentified flying object, the UFO, had arrived. Greg Eghigian tells the story of the world's fascination with UFOs and the prospect that they were the work of visitors from outer space. While accounts of great wonders in the sky date back to antiquity, reports of UFOs took place against the unique backdrop of the Cold War and space age, giving rise to disputed government inquiries, breathtaking news stories, and single-minded sleuths.  After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon (Oxford UP, 2024) traces how a seemingly isolated incident sparked an international drama involving shady figures, questionable evidence, suspicions of conspiracy, hoaxes, new religions, scandals, unsettling alien encounters, debunkers, and celebrities. It examines how descriptions, theories, and debates about unidentified flying objects and alien abduction changed over time and how they appeared in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Russia. And it explores the impact UFOs have had on our understanding of space, science, technology, and ourselves up through the present day. Replete with stories of the people who have made up the ufology community, the military and defense units that investigate them, the scientists and psychologists who have researched these unexplained encounters, and the many novels, movies, TV shows, and websites that have explored these phenomena, After the Flying Saucers Came speaks to believers and skeptics alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The brainchild of an obscure Yugoslav physician, Krebiozen emerged in 1951 as an alleged cancer treatment. Andrew Ivy, a University of Illinois vice president and a famed physiologist dubbed “the conscience of U.S. science,” wholeheartedly embraced Krebiozen. Ivy’s impeccable credentials and reputation made the treatment seem like another midcentury medical miracle. But after years of controversy, the improbable saga ended with Krebiozen proved a sham, its inventor fleeing the country, and Ivy’s reputation and legacy in ruins. Matthew C. Ehrlich’s history of Krebiozen tells a quintessential story of quackery. Though most experts dismissed the treatment, it found passionate public support not only among cancer patients but also people in good health. The treatment’s rise and fall took place against the backdrop of America’s never-ending suspicion of educational, scientific, and medical expertise. In addition, Ehrlich examines why people readily believe misinformation and struggle to maintain hope in the face of grave threats to well-being. A dramatic account of fraud and misplaced trust, The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine (U Illinois Press, 2024) shines a light on a forgotten medical scandal and its all-too-familiar relevance in the twenty-first century. Matthew C. Ehrlich is professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois. He has previously published five books including Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK and Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

School vouchers are often framed as a way to help students and families by providing choice, but evidence shows that vouchers have a negative impact on educational outcomes.  In The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers (Harvard Education Press, 2024), Josh Cowen describes voucher programs as the product of decades of work by influential conservatives and wealthy activists to support a vision of America where education is privatized and removed from the public sphere. Far from realizing the purported goal of educational equity, Cowen cites multiple research studies that conclude that voucher programs return poor academic outcomes, including lower test scores on state exams, especially among students who are at greater academic risk because of their race, their religion, their gender identity, or their family's income. The books traces the history of vouchers from it's initial proposal as part of conservative economic policy through its adoption as a method for families to resist school desegregation. Since then, the issue of education "freedom" has been a part of an ongoing culture war waged through policymaking, legislation, and litigation.  Cowen describes the advocacy network that funds research and promotion of vouchers as a way to attain ideological goals related to conservative social policy, not educational outcomes.  Recommended reading:  East of Eden by John Steinbeck Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Martha Rampton, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society, informing how people understood the cosmos, divinity, and their own Christian faith. As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essence of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it. Martha Rampton is full of energy and excitement about her book and she and Jana Byars have a wonderful, spirited chat.  Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

One of the great divides in American judicial scholarship is between legal scholars who take the justices at their word and assume that those words define the law and political scientists who dismiss all judicial arguments as smokescreens for partisan bias or wider political forces. Today’s guest has written a book that bridges that divide.  In Rot and Revival: The History of Constitutional Law in American Political Development (U California Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Michael Kreis uses methods from history, law, and political science to theorize and document how politics make American constitutional law and how the courts affect the path of partisan politics. Understanding American constitutional law means looking at the relationship among dominant political coalitions, social movements, and the evolution of constitutional law as prescribed by judges. For Kreis, constitutional doctrine does not exist in a philosophical vacuum – it is a “distillation of partisan politics.” Rejecting the idea that the Constitution's significance and interpretation can be divorced from contemporary political realities, Kreis uses tools from law, history, and American political development to explain how American constitutional law reflects the ideological commitments of dominant political coalitions, the consequences of major public policy choices, and the influences of intervening social movements. For Kreis, constitutional law is “best understood through the diachronic lens of American Political Development (APD) and the concept of political time. Kreis concludes that the courts have never been—and cannot be—institutions lying outside the currents of national politics. Dr. Anthony Michael Kreis is assistant professor at Georgia State University College of Law where he teaches constitutional law and works at the intersection of law and American Political Development. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Washington & Lee University, respectively, and his PhD from the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. Mentioned: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s March 15, 1965 speech before Congress on voting rights Keith E. Whittington’s Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy and other works Gerald Rosenberg’s The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?  Correction: Justices Sotomayor and Kagan were nominated by President Obama and Justice Jackson was nominated by President Biden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Kaitlin Sidorsky’s new book, All Roads Lead to Power: The Appointed and Elected Paths to Public Office for US Women (University Press of Kansas, 2019), is an extremely well written and important analysis of women in public life and public service. This book combines qualitative and quantitative research to examine appointed and elected state positions, particularly in regard to gender, and concludes that there are quite a few women in appointed positions, an area not usually the focus of research and analysis of women and power. Sidorsky notes that women in appointed positions on boards and commissions at the state and local level see themselves not in political positions but instead working in capacities to accomplish goals, serve the public, and continue along their career paths. In the way many of these women conceptualize their work in these positions, this is not necessarily about political ambition, as Sidorsky’s research discovers, but because this public work is usually connected to the individual office holder’s personal or professional life. This research will be of particular interest to those who study women and politics, political representation, and questions of politics and power. This is an excellent study and analysis, enlightening in both the data compiled and the assessment of the data within our understanding of appointed and elected positions, politics, and power. Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). You can follow her on twitter @gorenlj Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

When people migrate and settle in other countries, do they automatically form a diaspora? In Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora (U Chicago Press, 2024), Sharon M. Quinsaat explains the dynamic process through which a diaspora is strategically constructed. Quinsaat looks to Filipinos in the United States and the Netherlands—examining their resistance against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, their mobilization for migrants’ rights, and the construction of a collective memory of the Marcos regime—to argue that diasporas emerge through political activism. Social movements provide an essential space for addressing migrants’ diverse experiences and relationships with their homeland and its history. A significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of migration and social movements studies, Insurgent Communities illuminates how people develop collective identities in times of social upheaval. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on the relationship between identity and place in the construction of neighborhood development. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected the traditional laws of Judaism in favor of new norms established by Sabbetai Zevi, and abandoned reason for the ecstasy of messianic enthusiasm, one man watched in horror. Yaacob Dweck's new book Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas (Princeton University Press, 2019) tells the story of Jacob Sasportas, the Sephardic rabbi who, alone among Jewish leadership, challenged Sabbetai Zevi’s improbable claims and warned his fellow Jews that their Messiah was not the answer to their prayers. The story of a lone voice against the crowd, the story of a lonely man of faith who insisted on reason in the face of mass passion, Dissident Rabbi is the revelatory account of a spiritual leader who dared to articulate the value of rabbinic doubt in the face of messianic certainty. It is a revealing examination of how Sasportas’ life and legacy were rediscovered and appropriated by later generations of Jewish thinkers. Although his name may not be widely known, Sasportas’ impact continues in Jewish life today. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at [email protected] or tweet @embracingwisdom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Is there much to say about historical ties between two countries that are 8000 kilometres apart from each other? Actually, yes. In this episode Ene Selart, Junior Lecturer at University of Tartu, talks about her new book The Relations of Estonia and Japan from the 19th Century to early-21st Century (Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2024) which explores surprisingly intricate connections between Estonia and Japan. The book is trilingual (in Estonian, English and Japanese) and published by University of Tartu Press. Ene's research reveals that Estonian sailors got to the shores of Japan already in the early 19th century, during Japan's isolation period. Later, many Estonian soldiers participated in Russo-Japanese war and shared their experiences in letters and memoirs. All these cases offer a unique glimpse in how Estonians viewed and perceived Japan. The episode also explores the challenges of writing such a book and Ene's journey through ups and down of researching this field. The episode is hosted by Dr. Arvydas Kumpis, Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Vytautas Magnus University. Since 2023 he is also serving as the Head of Centre for Asian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A masterful account of the global Cold War’s decisive influence on Soviet economic reform, and the national decay that followed. What brought down the Soviet Union? From some perspectives the answers seem obvious, even teleological—communism was simply destined to fail. When Yakov Feygin studied the question, he came to another conclusion: at least one crucial factor was a deep contradiction within the Soviet political economy brought about by the country’s attempt to transition from Stalinist mass mobilization to a consumer society. Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform (Harvard UP, 2024) explores what happened in the Soviet Union as institutions designed for warfighting capacity and maximum heavy industrial output were reimagined by a new breed of reformers focused on “peaceful socioeconomic competition.” From Khrushchev on, influential schools of Soviet planning measured Cold War success in the same terms as their Western rivals: productivity, growth, and the availability of abundant and varied consumer goods. The shift was both material and intellectual, with reformers taking a novel approach to economics. Instead of trumpeting their ideological bona fides and leveraging their connections with party leaders, the new economists stressed technical expertise. The result was a long and taxing struggle for the meaning of communism itself, as old-guard management cadres clashed with reformers over the future of central planning and the state’s relationship to the global economic order. Feygin argues that Soviet policymakers never resolved these tensions, leading to stagnation, instability, and eventually collapse. Yet the legacy of reform lingers, its factional dynamics haunting contemporary Russian politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Ana Stevenson explores the ubiquity of what she terms the “woman-slave analogy” in nineteenth-century US feminist discourse. Using examples from the women’s suffrage, abolition, dress-reform, and labor movements, among others, Steveson reconstructs the creation of this theoretical framework that imagined women’s subjugation as similar to, and sometimes even worse than, the plight of enslaved Americans. Although the women-slave analogy sometimes appeared tone-deaf, Stevenson demonstrates the many different ways that reformers--men and women, black and white--embraced the concept to fight for women’s political, legal, and economic rights. Crucially, Stevenson’s book encourages us to rethink the intellectual foundations of modern feminism and to critically evaluate the legacy of the women-as-slave worldview. Chelsea Gibson is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Binghamton University. Her research explores the reception of Russian terrorist women in the United States before 1917.       Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 2010, Isabel Wilkerson spoke to the Institute about the fifteen years she spent reporting and writing her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Knopf, 2010). The book won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, In 1994, Wilkerson was the New York Times Chicago Bureau Chief when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her profile of a fourth-grader from Chicago's South Side, and for two stories on the Midwestern floods of 1993. She was the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents argues that racial stratification in the United States is best understood as a caste system, akin to those in India and in Nazi Germany She has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston universities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the social, political, and intellectual fault lines of the Age of Revolutions. But the gilded spines and elegant designs that decorate his archive obscure the truth: Moreau's achievements were predicated upon the work of enslaved people and free people of color. Their labor afforded him the leisure to research, think, and write. Their rich intellectual and linguistic cultures filled the pages of his most applauded works. Every beautiful book Moreau produced contains an embedded story of hidden violence. In Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2023), Sara Johnson's arresting investigation of race and knowledge in the revolutionary Atlantic surrounds Moreau with the African-descended people he worked so hard to erase, immersing him in a vibrant community of language innovators, forgers of kinship networks, and world travelers who strove to create their own social and political lives. Built from archival fragments, creative speculation, and audacious intellectual courage, Encyclopédie noire is a communal biography of the women and men who made Moreau’s world. Sara E. Johnson is professor of literature of the Americas at University of California, San Diego. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Algerian War of Independence constituted a major turning point of 20th century history. The conflict exacerbated divisions in French society, culminating in an unsuccessful coup attempt by the OAS in 1961. The war also launched the Third Worldist movement, delegitimized colonial rule because of its brutality, and it gave us one of the towering anti-colonial intellectual figures, the pro-FLN Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Today’s episode focuses on another important development that occurred as a result of the Algerian War: the transformation of modern warfare. Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency (Cornell UP, 2024) shows how French generals, officers, and civil officials sought to counter Algerian independence with their own project of social transformation. My guest, Terrence Peterson, argues that the French military effort in Algeria never exclusively focused on repression. Instead, military leaders fashioned new forms of surveillance and social control that its proponents hoped would capture the loyalty of Algerians and transform Algerian society. Although ultimately unsuccessful in its attempt to ‘keep Algeria French,’ the new strategy of counterinsurgency became a model for anti-communist military and intelligence officers around the world. Terrence Peterson is an Associate Professor of History at Florida International University, where he teaches on modern Europe and European empires. He holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the first book in the Modern Music Masters series, Tom Boniface-Webb examines the Manchester band Modern Music Masters-Oasis (MMM, 2020). Founded in 1994 and playing together until their spectacular and abrupt breakup in 2009, during their time together Oasis made an imprint on British music that will last for generations, impacting fans throughout the world. Modern Music Masters-Oasis looks at the ways in which the band's chart placings--including eight number 1 albums and eight number 1 singes- show the larger narrative of rock-n-roll and the way Oasis impacted the rock-n-roll landscape during their 15-year history. Modern Music Masters-Oasis is the first in this series of books that explores artists (most of which from the United Kingdom) by looking at the social and political environment surrounding their careers.  Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, the Seleucid kings ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia to Anatolia, Armenia to the Persian Gulf. In a radical move to impose unity and regulate behavior, this Graeco-Macedonian imperial power introduced a linear and transcendent conception of time. Under Seleucid rule, time no longer restarted with each new monarch. Instead, progressively numbered years, identical to the system we use today—continuous, irreversible, accumulating—became the de facto measure of historical duration. This new temporality, propagated throughout the empire, changed how people did business, recorded events, and oriented themselves to the larger world. Challenging this order, however, were rebellious subjects who resurrected their pre-Hellenistic pasts and created apocalyptic time frames that predicted the total end of history. The interaction of these complex and competing temporalities led to far-reaching religious, intellectual, and political developments. Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire (Harvard University Press, 2018) by Paul J. Kosmin, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, opens a new window onto empire, resistance, and the meaning of history in the ancient world. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct faculty member in history at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In our interview about Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), James M. Scott discusses the principles and personalities involved in the most destructive air attack in history. Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed. Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields, and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight “precision” bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later. Drawing on first-person interviews with American pilots and bombardiers and Japanese survivors, air force archives, and oral histories never before published in English, Scott delivers a harrowing and gripping account, and his most important and compelling work to date. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

An illuminating deep-dive into everything Fleetwood Mac--the songs, the rivalries, the successes, and the failures—Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwood Mac (Pegasus Books, 2024) evokes the band's entire musical catalog as well as the complex human drama at the heart of the Fleetwood Mac story. Fleetwood Mac has had a ground-breaking career spanning over fifty years and includes some of the best-selling albums and greatest hits of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But the band's unique story is one of enormous triumph and also deep tragedy. There has never been a band in the history of music riven with as much romantic drama, sexual tension, and incredible highs and lows as Fleetwood Mac. Dreams is a must-read for casual Fleetwood Mac fans and die-hard devotees alike. Presenting mini-biographies, observations, and essays, Mark Blake explores all eras of the Fleetwood Mac story to explore what it is that has made them one of the most successful bands in history. Blake draws on his own exclusive interviews with Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, and the late Peter Green and Christine McVie, and addresses the complex human drama at the heart of the Fleetwood Mac story, including the complicated relationships between the band's main members, but he also dives deep into the towering discography that the band has built over the past half-century. Among Mark Blake's previous books are Magnifico!: The A to Z of Queen; the bestselling Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd; and Bring It On Home: Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin and Beyond, which was listed as a "Music Book of the Year" by the London Times, the Sunday Times, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph. Mark lives in England. Mark on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, Spring 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025). Bradley on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971–87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwin.” In Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France (Duke UP, 2018), Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs Baldwin’s home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his complex and underappreciated later works. Zaborowska shows how the themes of dwelling and black queer male sexuality in The Welcome Table, Just above My Head, and If Beale Street Could Talk directly stem from Chez Baldwin's influence on the writer. The house was partially torn down in 2014. Accessible, heavily illustrated, and drawing on interviews with Baldwin's friends and lovers, unpublished letters, and manuscripts, Me and My House offers new insights into Baldwin's life, writing, and relationships, making it essential reading for all students, scholars, and fans of Baldwin. Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Professor of Afroamerican and American Studies and the John Rich Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dan Stone tells the story of the last great unknown archive of Nazism, the International Tracing Service. Set up by the Allies at the end of World War II, the ITS has worked until today to find missing persons and to aid survivors with restitution claims or to reunite them with loved ones. From retracing the steps of the 'death marches' with the aim of discovering the burial sites of those murdered across the towns and villages of Central Europe, to knocking on doors of German foster homes to find the children of forced laborers, Fate Unknown uncovers the history of this remarkable archive and its more than 30 million documents. Under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the tracing service became one of the most secretive of postwar institutions, unknown even to historians of the period.  Delving deeply into the archival material, Stone examines the little-known sub-camps and, after the war, survivors' experience of displaced persons' camps, bringing to life remarkable stories of tracing. Fate Unknown combs the archives to reveal the real horror of the Holocaust by following survivors' horrific journeys through the Nazi camp system and its aftermath. The postwar period was an age of shortage of resources, bitterness, and revenge. Yet the ITS tells a different story: of international collaboration, of commitment to justice, and of helping survivors and their relatives in the context of Cold War suspicion. These stories speak to a remarkable attempt by the ITS, before the Holocaust was a matter of worldwide interest, to carry out a program of ethical repair and to counteract some of the worst effects of the Nazis' crimes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today I talked to Duncan Simpson about his book Tenho o prazer de informar o senhor director: cartas de portugueses à PIDE (1958-1968)   ("I am pleased to inform the director: letters from Portuguese people to PIDE (1958-1968)") Were the Portuguese mere victims of the PIDE and the oppressive policies it imposed or, in reality, as under any authoritarian regime, did they interact with this police force by serving it or making use of it? Created in 1945, in a merely cosmetic reformulation of its predecessor (the PVDE), as it was too closely associated with the “fascist era”, the PIDE (acronym for International and State Defense Police) maintained the extensive arbitrary powers of the PVDE in its triple mission: guaranteeing “state security” (eliminating political dissent), controlling borders and acting as an intelligence service. To this end, it was necessary to create a network of informants. To this day, the bibliography dedicated exclusively to PIDE continues to focus on the mechanisms of repression exercised over the small minority of opponents to the regime, as if this were the only form of relationship between society and PIDE. The main consequence of this type of approach was to reduce the bulk of the population to the status of “victim people”, who passively endured the repression carried out by PIDE. However, the reality is much more complex, as this work aims to demonstrate. The relationship between Portuguese society and PIDE has always been much more active and multifaceted than has been recognized to date. The Portuguese were never a simple “victim people” passively and fearfully enduring the repressive impetus of the PIDE. On the contrary, Portuguese society actively adapted to the presence of the political police and this book aims to illustrate the ways in which ordinary citizens interacted freely with the PIDE, often (but not always) using it to fulfill personal interests or satisfy basic needs. of everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Recurring tropes about fragmented communities living on frontier forestlands living in Southeast Asia are that they are either guardians of flora and fauna their destroyers. In much analysis gravitating to one or other position in this dichotomy the role of organised religion is absent. But as Faizah Zakaria shows in The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia published by the University of Washington Press (2023) shows conversions from animist belief systems to Islam and Christianity enabled human-centric views that helped alienate the natural world from Batak communities for wealth. Using a wide array of archival evidence from the 19th century from North Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, this book sheds light on the power of everyday religious practice to shape the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The idea of “backwardness” often plagues historical writing on Russia. In Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease under Romanovs and Soviets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Dr. John P. Davis counteracts this “backwardness” paradigm, arguing that from the early 19th to the early 20th centuries, Russian medical researchers—along with their counterparts in France and Germany—were at the forefront of the struggle against cholera. Davis’ birds-eye view of this hundred-year period illustrates that the conditions allowing cholera to flourish were the same set of conditions that helped create the collapse of the tsarist regime during the First World War. Credit for elimination of cholera must go to the Bolsheviks, both for implementing tsarist-era medical theory, and especially for making war on cholera in a organized, systematic manner that the old regime was variously unable or unwilling to achieve. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What makes us human? What, if anything, sets us apart from all other creatures? Ever since Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the answer to these questions has pointed to our own intrinsic animal nature. Yet the idea that, in one way or another, our humanity is entangled with the non-human has a much longer and more venerable history. In the West, it goes all the way back to classical antiquity.  The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures That Make Us Human (Cambridge UP, 2024) boldly reveals how the ancient world mobilised concepts of 'the animal' and 'animality' to conceive of the human in a variety of illuminating ways. Through ten stories about marvelous mythical beings - from the Trojan Horse to the Cyclops, and from Androcles' lion to the Minotaur - Julia Kindt unlocks fresh ways of thinking about humanity that extend from antiquity to the present and that ultimately challenge our understanding of who we really are. Julia Kindt is Professor of Ancient History, ARC Future Fellow (2018-22), a member of the Sydney Environment Institute, and elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is a contributor to TLS, the Australian Book Review, Meanjin, History Today, The Conversation, and other magazines. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Political Scientist E.J. Fagan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, once worked at a think tank, and has long been interested in the intersecting work of think tanks and politics. Thus, The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics (Oxford UP, 2024) is an outgrowth of Fagan’s academic research and experience. Think tanks, by their very nature, are generally creating information, knowledge, policy ideas, and the like, with the intention of influencing the policy that is made by elected officials. Those who work at think tanks are generally experts in particular policy areas, and they produce information. Think tanks are not academic institutions, and they are not part of political parties either. They are private organizations that can have policy influence on parties, candidates, and policy development. In The Thinkers, Fagan pays close attention to four think tanks that he explains are the most partisan among the hundreds of think tanks: the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Center for American Progress, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. There are many other think tanks, and Fagan explains that these four have had the most direct engagement in developing policy that is then taken up by elected officials (members of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, the president and White House advisors, as well as governors and state-level elected officials.) The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics assesses the role of think tanks within partisan politics and the connections between these organizations and the policy outcomes we often see in presidential administrations and in Congress. The book also highlights a significant finding, that the rise of think tanks has contributed to the polarization within American politics. Fagan has the data to support this finding, noting that the increased influence of the think tanks, the issue areas where they are directing their work and research, and the increased polarization over the past few decades. The Thinkers teases out the connection between lawmakers and neutral experts—who tend to be academics doing research at colleges and universities, and those working at think tanks, who have interpolated between these two groups. This is an important part of the research on think tanks and how they operate, especially the think tanks that are more partisan and working closely to influence policy outcomes. Given the current focus on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, we also discussed how this is an example of the way that the more partisan think tanks engage in the policy development process, and how they hope to influence politicians and elected officials. The Thinkers is a fascinating study of American think tanks and their role and place within our political system. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From the Occupy protests to climate change school strikes and the Black Lives Matter movement, the 21st century has been rife with activism. Although very different from one another, each of these movements have created alliances across borders and show that these issues are not confined to individual nation states. In this book, Daniel Laqua shows that these global efforts are not just a recent phenomenon, and that as long as there have been borders, activists have sought to cross them.  Showing how individuals, groups and organisations have fostered bonds in their quest for political and social change, and exploring how national or ideological boundaries have impacted their efforts, Activism Across Borders Since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and Beyond Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022) traces activists and movements from 1870 to the 21st century. Focusing on Europe but with a global outlook, it examines groups and individuals that expressed far-reaching ambitions and operated within imperial or post-colonial settings. From feminism and socialism to anti-war campaigns and green politics, this book offers a synthesis of transnational activism through four analytical lenses; connectedness, ambivalence, transience and marginality. In doing so, it demonstrates the intertwined nature of different movements, problematizes transnational action, discusses the temporary nature of some alliances, and shows how transnationalism has been used by those marginalised at the national level. With a broad chronological perspective and thematic chapters, it provides historical context, clarifies terms and concepts and offers an alternative history of the modern world through the lens of activists, movements and campaigns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Many historical figures have their lives and works shrouded in myth, both in life and long after their deaths. Charles Darwin (1809–82) is no exception to this phenomenon and his hero-worship has become an accepted narrative. Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods (Cambridge UP, 2024) unpacks this narrative to rehumanize Darwin's story and establish what it meant to be a 'genius' in the Victorian context. Leading Darwin scholars have come together to argue that, far from being a lonely genius in an ivory tower, Darwin had fortune, diligence and – crucially – community behind him. The aims of this essential work are twofold. First, to set the historical record straight, debunking the most pervasive myths and correcting falsehoods. Second, to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of science itself, relevant to historians, scientists and the public alike. Aims to debunk myths and correct falsehoods about Charles Darwin's life and work Leading Darwin scholars offer new conclusions about the history and nature of science Accessibly written for readers across many fields including history, philosophy and the sciences Kostas Kampourakis is the author and editor of several books about evolution, genetics, philosophy and history of science, as well as the editor of the Cambridge University Press book series Understanding Life. He teaches biology and science education courses at the University of Geneva Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) never crossed the Atlantic himself, but his impact in colonial Latin America was profound. Prints made after the Flemish artist’s designs were routinely sent from Europe to the Spanish Americas, where artists used them to make all manner of objects. Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (Getty Research Institute, 2021) by Dr. Aaron M. Hyman is the first comprehensive study of this transatlantic phenomenon, despite broad recognition that it was one of the most important forces to shape the artistic landscapes of the region. Copying, particularly in colonial contexts, has traditionally held negative implications that have discouraged its serious exploration. Yet analysing the interpretation of printed sources and recontextualizing the resulting works within period discourse and their original spaces of display allow a new critical reassessment of this broad category of art produced in colonial Latin America—art that has all too easily been dismissed as derivative and thus unworthy of sustained interest and investigation. This book takes a new approach to the paradigms of artistic authorship that emerged alongside these complex creative responses, focusing on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the use of European prints was an essential component of the very framework in which colonial artists forged ideas about what it meant to be a creator. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the shadow of recent turmoil, Join the Conspiracy: How a Brooklyn Eccentric Got Lost on the Right, Infiltrated the Left and Brought Down the Biggest Bombing Network in New York (Fordham University Press, 2024) transports readers to a pivotal moment of division and dissent in American history: the late 1960s. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and a nation grappling with internal conflict, this compelling narrative follows the life of George Demmerle, a factory worker whose political odyssey encapsulates the era's tumultuous spirit. From his roots as a concerned citizen wary of his country's leftward tilt, Demmerle's journey takes a dramatic turn as he delves into the heart of radical activism. Participating in iconic protests from the March on Washington to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Demmerle's story is a whirlwind of political fervor, embodying the struggle against what was perceived as imperialist war and racial injustice. His transformation is marked by alliances with key figures of the time, including Abbie Hoffman and an eventual leadership role within an East Coast Black Panther affiliate. Yet, beneath his radical veneer lies a secret: Demmerle is an FBI informant. Join the Conspiracy reveals Demmerle's complex role in a society at war with itself, where his deepening involvement with the radical left and a bombing collective forces him to confront his loyalties. The narrative, enriched by a rare trove of period documents, candid photos taken from inside the radical movement, and underground art – more than a hundred of which are included in the book – not only charts Demmerle's saga but also reflects the broader story of a nation struggling to find its moral compass amidst chaos. As Demmerle navigates the dangerous waters of political extremism, readers are invited to ponder the price of ideology, the nature of loyalty, and the fine line between activism and betrayal. This book is not just a recounting of historical events but a vibrant portrait of a man and a movement that sought to reshape America. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Political Theorist David Lay Williams has a new book that traces the problem of economic inequality through the thought of many of the canonical thinkers in Western political theory. The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx (Princeton UP, 2024) explores the thought of Socrates and Plato, Jesus, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. We often turn to these thinkers and their various works to consider how best to establish political regimes and understand political power. But it is quite difficult to separate economics from politics, since these are both key parts of all societies.  And this is the thrust of William’s work in The Greatest of All Plagues. We expect to find critiques of economics in Karl Marx or Adam Smith, given the focus of their political thought. But The Greatest of All Plagues demonstrates how vital the economic questions are for all of these western thinkers, and how concerned they each were with the concentration of wealth among the few within a society. This is a key component of the analysis in the book and in our conversation: “economic inequality” is a broad term and encompasses many complexities, but the thrust of the book is that each thinker is particularly concerned about the wealthy and the poor, and the destabilizing impact of a very few having great wealth. This is not to exclude poverty from the analysis, but much attention is often paid to the poor and ways to solve poverty. Scant attention is generally paid to the problem posed by excessive wealth, and the imbalance between those possessing great wealth and the rest of the society, and how this is problematic for political regimes and societies. The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx is an impressive exploration of not only the work of these political thinkers, but also of the many scholars who have studied these works and these thinkers. There is much depth to this study, and the reader learns a great deal about the works themselves, the theorist under consideration in each chapter, historical context, and the interrelationship between politics and inequality. Williams is clear that his focus is on economic inequality in political theory, and not other, equally important inequalities. During the course of our conversation, we only touch on the surface of this complex and deep work. It is a worthy subject for investigation and this well-written and accessible book provides the reader with a rich discourse on the reason why we should pay attention to wealth inequality and how it contributes to societal instability, the corruption of character and soul, and how it remains an ongoing threat to justice, democracy, freedom and faith. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople, to Baghdad in 800, and then to Renaissance Venice in the 15th century. Moller demonstrates how tenuous were the chances of such ancient works’ survival, from the depredations of invading armies to the hazards of fire and flooding, to the problems of translation through multiple languages over the centuries. The migration of ancient texts from Greece to the Middle East and back to medieval Europe is a fascinating story of how knowledge was preserved when certain conditions were met, such as political stability, the willingness of itinerant scholarly “manuscript hunters” to risk life and limb to find obscure, ancient texts, and the openness to tolerate and embrace knowledge derived from other cultures and civilizations. Moller’s book is the story of how the texts upon which the modern world was built were acquired through fortuitous accident and scholarly diligence. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science. Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself. Elizabeth A. Williams is professor emerita of history at Oklahoma State University. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

John Garrison's Red Hot + Blue (33 1/3 Series) (Bloomsbury, 2024)  is a meditation on music's capacity to find us, transform us, and help us make sense of our historical moment. In a narrative that blends memoir and history, Red Hot + Blue explores Garrison's coming out at the height of the AIDS crisis alongside the history of the music industry's response to the epidemic. The book's centerpiece is a major 1990 effort by musical artists to break through the silence and stigma about the disease. The resulting tribute album drew inspiration from the life and work of the legendary composer Cole Porter, who himself wrestled with the joy and sorrow that accompanies love in a judgmental society. Leading musicians, including Debbie Harry, Annie Lennox, Sinead O'Connor, Iggy Pop, and U2, interpreted some of Porter's most iconic songs - “Don't Fence Me In,” “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Night and Day”- offering not just a joyful tribute to a composer and a community, but a shared vision of survival. Red Hot + Blue returns us to the early 1990s to reveal how the love songs of the past can be revived to speak to new audiences in times of need. The book is the portrait of an album, a pandemic and a young man's coming of age in the era of both. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Ancient Christians and their non-Christian contemporaries lived in a world of 'magic.' Sometimes, they used curses as ritual objects to seek justice from gods and other beings; sometimes, they argued against them. Curses, and the writings of those who polemicized against curses, reveal the complexity of ancient Mediterranean religions, in which materiality, poetics, song, incantation, and glossolalia were used as technologies of power. Laura Nasrallah's book Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses: Magic, Aesthetics, and Justice (Cambridge UP, 2023) reframes the field of religion, the study of the Roman imperial period, and the investigation of the New Testament and ancient Christianity. Her approach eschews disciplinary aesthetics that privilege the literature and archaeological remains of elites, and that defines curses as magical materials, separable from religious ritual. Moreover, Nasrallah's imaginative use of art and 'research creations' of contemporary Black painters, sculptors, and poets offer insights for understanding how ancient ritual materials embedded into art work intervene into the present moment and critique injustice. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented Ancient Jew Review Laura Salah Nasrallah is Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

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 written. Almost certainly a forgery, the so-called Zinoviev Letter, had no original and has never been traced. Notwithstanding, the Letter still haunts British politics. It was the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and it even cropped up in the British media as recently as during the Referendum campaign of 2016 and the 2017 general election. The Letter, addressed to the leadership of the British Communist Party, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervor, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Communist International in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, the Letter’s publication by the Daily Mail on October 25th 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a “Red Scare” in the media. Labour blamed (erroneously) the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been an establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it. The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call “fake news”. Now, former Chief Historian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Dr. Gill Bennett, who headed up an official inquiry into the Zinoviev Affair in the late 1990s, takes another look at this matter in a fascinating book, The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies (Oxford University Press, 2018). Employing research skills honed by forty-years work at the Foreign Office, Dr. Bennett entrances the reader with this still fascinating detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946 (University of Wisconsin Press) first appeared in 2015 when it comprised of a hardback book, five CDs, and one DVD. It went on to win the “Best Historical Research in Folk or World Music” award from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, was nominated for a Grammy for “Best Album Notes,” received universally superlative reviews, and sold out within a year. The project has now been re-issued as a paperback, albeit without any accompanying discs; instead the related tracks and film footage are now available for online access care of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library. It’s not hard to fathom why this monumental work received so much acclaim. A groundbreaking multimedia endeavor, Folksongs of Another America is the product of decades of work by the distinguished folklorist, James P. Leary. Leary is, amongst other things, Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Scandinavian Studies and Cofounder of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a former editor of the Journal of American Folklore, and a native of rural Wisconsin, which is one of the three states – along with Michigan and Minnesota – whose rich musical bounty is explored in this study. Leary sifted through over 2,000 field recordings, made by fieldworkers Sidney Robertson, Alan Lomax, and Helene Stratman-Thomas during the 1930s and 40s, to select the 187 tunes and songs that feature here. Together the chosen pieces create the impression of a region populated by immigrants from a host of different lands, as well as by Native Americans, all with their own musical traditions. For every track, Leary offers extensive documentation, information about the performers, and full lyrics (including in the original language with English translation as necessary which, given that the collection includes twenty-five languages, is often the case). The recordings themselves, which have been wonderfully restored and remastered, provide vivid aural experiences. Folksongs of Another America is, as noted by a reviewer for Deutschlandradio Kultur, “an exceptional achievement that demonstrates for the first time the full worth and cultural wealth of the Upper Midwest for music listeners.” Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Brewed from the dried leaves and tender shoots of an evergreen tree native to South America, yerba mate gives its drinkers the jolt of liquid effervescence many of us get from coffee or tea. In Argentina, southern "gaúcho" Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, mate is the stimulating brew of choice, famously quaffed by the Argentine national football team en route to its 2022 FIFA World Cup victory.  In The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History (Princeton UP, 2024), Christine Folch offers a wide-ranging exploration of the world's third-most popular naturally stimulating beverage. Folch discusses who drinks mate, and why, and whether this earthier caffeinated drink with its promise of a different buzz and a more authentic, spiritual connection to place can find a market niche beyond South America. Folch traces yerba mate's odysseys across the globe, from South America to the Middle East and North America. She discovers that mate inspired the world's first written tango, powered early Jesuit and German nationalist utopias, ignited one of modern history's most devastating wars, and fueled Catholic conspiracies. And, Folch reports, mate is currently starring in puppet shows put on by Syrian dissidents. By tracing yerba mate production and consumption as they change over time and place, from precolonial Indigenous beginnings to the present, Folch unravels the processes of commodification and their countervailing forces to show how accidents of botany intersect with political economic systems and personal taste. The stories behind the caffeinated infusions we prefer, she finds, are nothing less than the story of how the modern world is put together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia(New York University Press, 2019), Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, shifts the lens on the well-known narrative of Virginia’s founding to reveal the previously untold and utterly compelling story of the youths who, often unwillingly, entered into cross-cultural relationships—and became essential for the colony’s survival. Their story gives us unprecedented access to both sides of early Virginia. Here for the first time outside scholarly texts is an accurate portrayal of Pocahontas, who, from the age of ten, acted as emissary for her father, who ruled over the local tribes, alongside the never-before-told intertwined stories of Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole, young English boys who were forced to live with powerful Indian leaders to act as intermediaries. As Pocahontas, Thomas, Henry, and Robert collaborated and conspired in carrying messages and trying to smooth out difficulties, they never knew when they might be caught in the firing line of developing hostilities. While their knowledge and role in controlling communication gave them status and a degree of power, their relationships with both sides meant that no one trusted them completely. Written by an expert in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic history, Pocahontas and the English Boys unearths gems from the archives—Henry Spelman’s memoir, travel accounts, letters, and official reports and records of meetings of the governor and council in Virginia—and draws on recent archaeology to share the stories of the young people who were key influencers of their day and who are now set to transform our understanding of early Virginia. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today I talked to Anne Landau and Margaret Sinclair, the translators of Through the Morgue Door: One Woman’s Story of Survival and Saving Children in German-Occupied Paris (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) n 1934, at the age of fourteen, Colette Brull-Ulmann knew that she wanted to become a pediatrician. By the age of twenty-one, she was in her second year of studying medicine. By 1942, Brull-Ulman and her family had become registered Jews under the ever-increasing statutes against them enacted by Petain's government. Her father had been arrested and interned at the Drancy detention camp and Brull-Ulman had become an intern at the Rothschild Hospital, the only hospital in Paris where Jewish physicians were allowed to practice and Jewish patients could go for treatment. Under Claire Heyman, a charismatic social worker who was a leader of the hospital's secret escape network, Brull-Ulmann began working tirelessly to rescue Jewish children treated at the Rothschild. Her devotion to the protection of children, her bravery, and her imperviousness in the face of the deadly injustices of the Holocaust were always evident--whether smuggling children to safety through the Paris streets in the dead of night or defying officers and doctors who frighteningly held her fate in their hands. Ultimately, Brull-Ulmann was forced to flee the Rothschild in 1943, when she joined her father's resistance network, gathering and delivering information for De Gaulle's secret intelligence agency until the Liberation in 1945. In 1970, Brull-Ulmann finally became a licensed pediatrician. But after the war, like so many others, she sought to bury her memories. It wasn't until decades later when she finally started to speak publicly--not only about her own work and survival, but about the one child who affected her most deeply. Originally published in French in 2017, Brull-Ulmann's memoir fearlessly illustrates the horrors of Jewish life under the German Occupation and casts light on the heretofore unknown story of the Rothschild Hospital during this period. But most of all, it chronicles the life of a truly exceptional and courageous woman for whom not acting was never an option. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Barrels – we rarely acknowledge their importance, but without them we would be missing out on some of the world’s finest wines and spirits. For over two thousand years they’ve been used to store, transport and age an incredibly diverse array of provisions around the globe. In this comprehensive and wide-ranging book titled Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels (Reaktion, 2024), now available in paperback, Henry H. Work tells the intriguing story of the significant and ever-evolving role wooden barrels have played during the last two millennia. Offering a new way of thinking about one of the most enduring and successful products in history, Wood, Whiskey and Wine is a must-read for everyone from technology and history buffs to wine and whiskey aficionados. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

One of my talking points when hanging out with my fellow diplomatic historians is the painful absence of scholarship on Hawaii. Too many political histories treat Hawaii’s statehood as a kind of historical inevitability, an event that was bound to pass the moment the kingdom was annexed. As I would frequently pontificate, “nobody has unpacked the imperial history of the islands in sufficient detail, nor the fact that their political fate diverged sharply from a number of other possessions.” For better and for worse, Sarah Miller-Davenport has robbed me of this particular talking point by writing a new book on the process of Hawaiian statehood, American imperialism and its relationship to mainland politics and society shortly after statehood. Gateway State: Hawai’i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire (Princeton University Press, 2019) takes a close look at some of the narratives that have grown up around the islands and unpacks them. She notes that the process of becoming a state was not a foregone conclusion and was in many ways predicated on Hawaii acting as a gatekeeper to Asia. She also notes that while the island’s racism was less fixed in certain ways than mainland racial norms, racism persisted in more subtle forms on the island. What emerges is a close look at how multiculturalism in service of egalitarianism can nevertheless be adapted to imperial norms. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Unexpected Revolutionaries: How Central Banks Made and Unmade Economic Orthodoxy (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Manuela Moschella investigates the institutional transformation of central banks from the 1970s to the present. Central banks are typically regarded as conservative, politically neutral institutions that uphold conventional macroeconomic wisdom. Yet in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, central banks have upended observer expectations by implementing largely unknown and unconventional monetary policies. Far from abiding by well-established policy playbooks, central banks now engage in practices such as providing liquidity support for a wide range of financial institutions and quantitative easing. They have even stretched the remit of monetary policy into issues such as inequality and climate change. Dr. Moschella argues that the political nature of central banks lies at the heart of these transformations. While formally independent, central banks need political support to justify their policies and powers, and to obtain it, they carefully manage their reputation among their audience selected officials, market actors, and citizens. Challenged by reputational threats brought about by twenty-first-century recessionary and deflationary forces, central banks such as the Federal Reserve System and the European Central Bank strategically deviated from orthodox monetary policies to preempt or manage political backlash and to regain public trust. Central banks thus evolved into a new role only in coordination with fiscal authorities and on the back of public contestation. Eye-opening and insightful, Unexpected Revolutionaries is necessary reading for discussions on the future of the neoliberal macroeconomic regime, the democratic oversight of monetary policymaking, and the role that central banks canor cannotplay in our domestic economies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space (I. B. Tauris, 2018), Cynthia Ruder explores how the building of the Moscow canal reflected the values of Stalinism and how it was used to create distinctly Soviet space, both real and imagined. She discusses the canal as a physical construct: an massive and important infrastructure project that would allow Moscow to have a steady supply of drinking water and create enough water pressure to allow for the construction of high rises, as well as a shipping channel that connected Moscow to the Volga and the Russian heartland and the rest of the world via the Baltic, White and Caspian seas, as well as the imagined spaces created, such as Moscow becoming “a port of five seas.” Ruder examines the Stalinist political system’s ability to tame and control water, bending it in service of socialism, and how these achievements were memorialized in art, song and literature. But she also explores the darker side of canal construction, the use of Gulag labor, the human cost it exacted and how this too was reflective of a Stalinist world-view. Building Stalinism provides an excellent look into the pervasive nature of Stalinism and its complex modern legacy.. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Citizen Cowboy: Will Rogers and the American People (Cambridge UP, 2024) is a probing biography of one of America's most influential cultural figures. Will Rogers was a youth from the Cherokee Indian Territory of Oklahoma who rose to conquer nearly every form of media and entertainment in the early twentieth century's rapidly expanding consumer society. Through vaudeville, the Ziegfeld Follies and Broadway, syndicated newspaper and magazine writing, the lecture circuit, radio, and Hollywood movies, Rogers built his reputation as a folksy humorist whose wit made him a national symbol of common sense, common decency, and common people. Though a friend of presidents, movie stars and industrial leaders, it was his bond with ordinary people that endeared him to mass audiences. Making his fellow Americans laugh and think while honoring the past and embracing the future, Rogers helped ease them into the modern world and they loved him for it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In his recent book, High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor (The Kent State University Press, 2024), Edwin P. Rutan II rehabilitates the motivations and contributions of late-war Union soldiers and reframes our understanding of how the Union won the Civil War. For more than a century, historians have disparaged the men who joined the Union army in the later days of the Civil War –– when higher bounty payments and the conditional draft were in effect –– as unpatriotic mercenaries who made poor soldiers and contributed little to the Union victory. However, as Rutan explains, historians have relied on the accounts of 1861 and 1862 veterans who resented these new recruits who had not yet suffered the hardships of war, and they were jealous of the higher bounties those recruits received. The result, he argues, is a long-standing mischaracterization of the service of 750,000 Union soldiers. High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac offers a much-needed correction to the historical record, providing a more balanced assessment of the “high-bounty” replacements in the Army of the Potomac. Rutan argues, using combat-effectiveness methodology, that they were generally competent soldiers and indispensable in defeating the Army of Northern Virginia. He also examines the issue of financial motivation, concluding that the volunteers of 1862 may have been more driven by economic incentives than once thought, and 1864 recruits were less driven by this than typically described. Thus, Rutan concludes that the Union “high-bounty” men do not deserve the scorn heaped on them by early volunteers and subsequent generations of historians. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola (U Chicago Press, 2024) takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mould research to meet industry needs. The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies.  Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives. Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today’s society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally.  By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today. Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Mango: A Global History (Reaktion, 2024) by Constance L. Kirker & Dr Mary Newman is a beautifully illustrated book that takes us on a tour through the rich world of mangoes, which inspire fervent devotion across the world. In South Asia, mangoes boast a history steeped in Hindu and Buddhist mythology, even earning a mention in the Kama Sutra. Beyond myth, mangoes hold literary significance as a potent metaphor. While mango-flavoured smoothies grace Western shelves, the true essence of sweet, juicy mangoes or tangy, unripe varieties is a rarity: supermarket offerings often prioritise shelf-life over taste. True mango aficionados savour the sensory delight of over a thousand vibrant varieties, relishing diverse colours, flavours from sweet to sour, textures and fragrances. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War II, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 (Oxford UP, 2020), begins with the event Winston Churchill called the "worst disaster" in British military history: the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese. As in the first volume of Todman's epic account of British involvement in World War II ("Total history at its best," according to Jay Winter), he highlights the inter-connectedness of the British experience in this moment and others, focusing on its inhabitants, its defenders, and its wartime leadership. Todman explores the plight of families doomed to spend the war struggling with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and, above all, the absence of their loved ones and the uncertainty of their return. It also documents the full impact of the entrance into the war by the United States, and its ascendant stewardship of the war. Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 is a triumph of narrative and research. Todman explains complex issues of strategy and economics clearly while never losing sight of the human consequences--at home and abroad--of the way that Britain fought its war. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped Great Britain and the world. Bob Wintermute is professor of history at Queens College, CUNY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Aleksander Pluskowski of the University of Reading joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, The Teutonic Knights: Rise and Fall of a Religious Corporation, out 2024 with Reaktion Books. A gripping account of the rise and fall of the last great medieval military order. This book provides a concise and incisive introduction to the knights of the Teutonic Order, the last of the great military orders established in the twelfth century.  The book traces the Order's evolution from a crusader field hospital into a major territorial ruler in northeastern Europe. Notably, the knights constructed distinctive fortified convents, including their headquarters in Western Christendom's largest castle. The narrative concludes with the Order's fifteenth-century decline due to the combined effects of a devastating war with Poland-Lithuania and the Protestant Reformation. The result is an accessible overview of this pivotal corporation in European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the years following World War II, the New York intellectuals became some of the most renowned critics and writers in the country. Although mostly male and Jewish, this prominent group also included women and non-Jews. Yet all of its members embraced a secular Jewish machismo that became a defining characteristic of the contemporary experience. Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Princeton University Press, 2024) examines how the New York intellectuals shared a uniquely American conception of Jewish masculinity that prized verbal confrontation, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation. Dr. Ronnie Grinberg paints illuminating portraits of figures such as Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and Irving Howe. She describes how their construction of Jewish masculinity helped to propel the American Jew from outsider to insider even as they clashed over its meaning in a deeply anxious project of self-definition. Along the way, Dr. Grinberg sheds light on their fraught encounters with the most contentious issues and ideas of the day, from student radicalism and the civil rights movement to feminism, Freudianism, and neoconservatism. A spellbinding chronicle of mid-century America, Write like a Man shows how a combative and intellectually grounded vision of Jewish manhood contributed to the masculinization of intellectual life and shaped some of the most important political and cultural debates of the postwar era. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Lise Butler’s Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945-70 (Oxford UP, 2020) invites us to revisit a figure who, in Butler’s words, is both a ‘relatively obscure’ yet also ‘curiously ubiquitous’ in the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain. The book uses Young, a policy maker and sociology to explore the role of social science in social democratic politics in the postwar period. Butler explores Young’s role in activities such as his role developing the Labour Party’s 1945 manifesto ‘Let us Face the Future’, his work as a sociologist, most notably in his monograph Family and Kinship in East London (co-authored with Peter Wilmott), and his role as a social innovator helping to establish Institute of Community Studies, the Consumers' Association, Which? magazine, the Social Science Research Council and the Open University. In doing so she offers a thought provoking story which encourages rethinking some of the common assumptions made about the role of sociology, and social science more broadly, in British politics. In this podcast we explore the themes of the book, which includes not only discussing the above but also themes such as the role of women and the family in Young’s thought, why he favoured the basic income, the social scientific turn in the history of modern Britain and why, exactly, buying a fridge is a political act. Matt Dawson is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow with research interests in social theory and the history of sociology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance. Over time, horses came to power mighty empires in Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, and, later, Russia. Genghis Khan and the thirteenth-century Mongols offer the most famous example, but from ancient Assyria and Persia, to the seventeenth-century Mughals, to the high noon of colonialism in the early twentieth century, horse breeding was indispensable to conquest and statecraft.  In Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires (Norton, 2024), scholar of Asian history David Chaffetz tells the story of how the horse made rulers, raiders, and traders interchangeable, providing a novel explanation for the turbulent history of the “Silk Road,” which might be better called the Horse Road. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

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 conflict. In their edited volume Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019), Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov uncover the collective history of the concept of partition and locate its genealogy in the politics of twentieth-century empire and decolonization. Moving beyond the nationalist frameworks that served in the first instance to promote partition as a natural phenomenon, the volume discusses creation of new political entities in the world of the British empire, from the Irish Free State, to the Dominions (later Republics) of India and Pakistan, and Palestine. Yorgos Giannakopoulos is a currently a Junior Research Fellow in Durham University, UK. He is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. His published research recovers the regional impact of British Intellectuals in Eastern Europe in the age of nationalism and internationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

During the mid-seventeenth century, Anglo-American Protestants described Native American ceremonies as savage devilry, Islamic teaching as violent chicanery, and Catholicism as repugnant superstition. By the mid-eighteenth century, they would describe amicable debates between evangelical missionaries and Algonquian religious leaders about the moral appeal of Christianity, recount learned conversations between English merchants and Muslim scholars, and tell of encounters with hospitable and sincere priests in Catholic Canada and Europe. What explains this poignant shift? Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Mark Valeri traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonisation of North America. After the English Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent growth of the British empire, observers began to link Britain's success to civic moral virtues, including religious toleration, rather than to any particular religious creed. Mark Valeri shows how a wide range of Protestants--including liberal Anglicans, Calvinist dissenters, deists, and evangelicals--began to see other religions not as entirely good or entirely bad, but as complex, and to evaluate them according to their commitment to religious liberty. In the view of these Protestants, varieties of religion that eschewed political power were laudable, while types of religion that combined priestly authority with political power were illegitimate. They also changed their evangelistic practices, jettisoning civilising agendas in favour of reasoned persuasion. Dr. Valeri neither valorizes Anglo-Protestants nor condemns them. Instead, he reveals the deep ambiguities in their ideas while showing how those ideas contained the seeds of modern religious liberty. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Ellen Hampton's Doctors at War: The Clandestine Battle Against the Nazi Occupation of France (LSU Press, 2023) tells the stories of physicians in France working to impede the German war effort and undermine French collaborators during the Occupation from 1940 to 1945. Determined to defeat the Third Reich's incursion, one group of prominent Paris doctors founded a medical network to treat injured Resistance fighters who they then secretly transported to Allied countries to avoid forced labor in Germany. Another team of medics organized a cabal focused on intelligence gathering and sabotage that became one of the largest in wartime France, even after the Gestapo arrested and imprisoned its leaders. Deported to concentration camps, these physicians continued to frustrate Nazi efforts by rendering aid and keeping their fellow prisoners alive. Others joined rural guerrilla camps to care for the young conscripts fighting to block German reinforcements from reaching Normandy after the D-Day landing. These stories, assembled here for the first time, add a crucial dimension to the history of Occupied France. Written for both historians and general readers of World War II history, Doctors at War stands as a dramatic, character-driven account of physicians' courage and resilience in the face of evil. It serves as a window into life under a fascist regime and the travails of doctors who negotiated the terrifying moral labyrinth that was the German military's occupation of France. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

I was immediately drawn to the book The Devil’s Music by Dr. Randall Stephens, Associate Professor of British and American Studies at the University of Oslo. Dr. Stephens and I came across one another online and the book, which combines part rock n’ roll history, part American Christianity history, was an absolute delight for me. The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock n’ Roll out now from Harvard University Press (2018), tells the story of how my experiences with rock music in the 1990’s came to be. From the inside cover of the book, “When rock n’roll emerged in the 1950’s, ministers denounced it from their pulpits and Sunday school teachers warned of the music’s demonic origins. The big beat, Billy Graham believed, was “ever working in the world for evil.” Yet by the early 2000s Christian rock had become a billion-dollar industry. The Devil’s Music tells the story of this transformation. Enjoy our conversation. Greg Soden is the host “Classical Ideas,” a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Marx’s Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx’s work results from a failure to understand his literary mode of expression. Through meticulous readings of key passages in Marx’s oeuvre, Silva isolates the key elements of his style: his search for an “architectonic” unity at the level of the text, his capacity to express himself dialectically at the level of the sentence, and, above all, his great gift for metaphor. Silva’s unique sensitivity to Marx’s literary choices allows him to illuminate a number of terms that have been persistently, and fatefully, misunderstood by many of Marx’s most influential readers, including alienation, reflection, and base and superstructure. At the heart of Silva’s book is his contention that we we cannot hope to understand Marx if we treat him as a scientist, a philosopher, or a literary writer, when he was in fact all three at once. Originally published in 1971, this is a key work by one of the most important Latin American Marxists of the twentieth century. This edition, which marks the first appearance of one of Silva’s works in English, features an introduction by Alberto Toscano. Alberto Toscano is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's The Century and Logics of Worlds. He served as both editor and translator of Badiou's Theoretical Writings and On Beckett Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Though traditionally regarded as a monarch who failed to arrest the gradual decline of his kingdom, the Korean king Chŏngjo has benefited in recent decades from a wave of new scholarship which has reassessed both his reign and his role in Korean history. The latest to do so is Christopher Lovins, who in his book King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea (State University of New York Press 2019) explains how as king Chŏngjo governed not as a weak ruler but as an absolute monarch. Lovins situates this within modern definitions of absolutism, showing how their conceptualizations apply to Chŏngjo just as effectively as they do to such period rulers as the Chinese emperor Qianlong and the French monarch Louis XIV. Motivated by the experiences with court factionalism that he blamed for the death of his father, Chŏngjo drew upon Confucian thinking to strengthen his position ideologically. These arguments he used to centralize power in his hands, most dramatically in his strengthening of the traditionally weak Korean army. Though many of Chŏngjo’s changes were undone after his death in 1800, Lovins makes the case that Chŏngjo’s legacy should be considered separate from the failings of his successors rather than as part of them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the years following Hitler’s rise to power, German Jews faced increasingly restrictive antisemitic laws, and many responded by fleeing to more tolerant countries. Cities of Refuge: German Jews in London and New York, 1935-1945 (SUNY Press, 2019), compares the experiences of Jewish refugees who immigrated to London and New York City by analyzing letters, diaries, newspapers, organizational documents, and oral histories. Lori Gemeiner-Bihler examines institutions, neighborhoods, employment, language use, name changes, dress, family dynamics, and domestic life in these two cities to determine why immigrants in London adopted local customs more quickly than those in New York City, yet identified less as British than their counterparts in the United States did as American. By highlighting a disparity between integration and identity formation, Gemeiner-Bihler challenges traditional theories of assimilation and provides a new framework for the study of refugees and migration. Lori Gemeiner-Bihler is Associate Professor of History at Framingham State University. Robin Buller is a Doctoral Candidate in History at UNC Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands during World War II changed Alaska, serving as justification for a large American military presence across the peninsula and advancing colonialism into the territory in the years before statehood.  In Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II (U Washington Press, 2024), University of New Mexico historian Holly Guise uses a range of sources and methods, including oral history, to explain how Native people from several tribes across Alaska, experienced, resisted, and proved resiliant to, American colonialism in the mid-20th century. From forced relocation to outright warfare and sexual violence, the 1940s were a difficult decade for Alaska Natives, but through community building, activism, and even mundane forms of resistance and resiliance, Indigenous people across the region were able to, in Guise's words, engage in "equilibirum restoration" and maintain their links to each other, and to the land itself. Alaska Native Resilience forces readers to rethink what they know about World War II, and places a region often thought of as at the periphery of that war directly in the center of the story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Michelle Tusan profoundly reshapes the story of how the First World War ended in the Middle East. Tracing Europe's war with the Ottoman Empire through to the signing of Lausanne, which finally ended the war in 1923, she places the decisive Allied victory over Germany in 1918 in sharp relief against the unrelenting war in the East and reassesses the military operations, humanitarian activities and diplomatic dealings that continued after the signing of Versailles in 1919.  She shows how, on the Middle Eastern Front, Britain and France directed Allied war strategy against a resurgent Ottoman Empire to sustain an imperial system that favored Europe's dominance within the nascent international system. The protracted nature of the conflict and ongoing humanitarian crisis proved devastating for the civilian populations caught in its wake and increasingly questioned old certainties about a European-led imperial order and humanitarian intervention. Its consequences would transform the postwar world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Cyrus Mody, Professor in the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation and Director of the STS Program at Maastricht University, about his book, The Squares: US Physical and Engineering Scientists in the Long 1970s (MIT Press, 2022). Many narratives about contemporary technologies, especially digital computing and the Internet, focus on the influences of 1960s counter-cultures. In _The Squares_, Mody takes the opposite approach and asks how square, non-counter-cultural scientists and engineers reacted to their changing environments in the 1970s. Vinsel and Mody also talk about what this story may suggest about current efforts to refocus STEM education on “values.” The pair also discuss how, over the course of his career, Mody has continually used a set of historical actors he knows a great deal about to examine different historical themes and questions. Finally, they discuss Mody’s current projects and where he is headed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Marie-Eve Desrosiers (Univ. of Ottawa) has written a wonderful book. Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control Before the Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 20203) challenges scholarly and policy assumptions about the strength and control of authoritarian governments in Rwanda in the decades before the 1994 genocide. Desrosiers employs original archival data and interviews to highlight the complex relations between authorities, opponents, and society. Through careful, detailed analysis, Desrosiers offers a nuanced assessment of the functions and evolution of authoritarianism over time, demonstrating how the governments of Rwanda's first two post-independence Republics (1962- 1990) sought and often struggled to cement their rule. Whilst the deeper, lived realities of authoritarianism are generally neglected by multi-case comparisons at the heart of comparative authoritarian studies, this illuminating survey highlights the essential, yet subtle authoritarian strategies, patterns, and forms of decay that are too often overlooked when addressing authoritarian contexts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

South Africa remains the only state that developed a nuclear weapons capability, but ultimately decided to dismantle existing weapons and abandon the programme. Disarming Apartheid: The End of South Africa's Nuclear Weapons Programme and Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 1968–1991 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Robin E. Möser reconstructs the South African decision-making and diplomatic negotiations over the country's nuclear weapons programme and its international status, drawing on new and extensive archival material and interviews. This deeply researched study brings to light a unique disarmament experience. It traces the country's previously neglected path towards accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Rather than relying primarily on US government archives, the book joins the burgeoning field of national nuclear histories based on unprecedented access to policymakers and documents in the country studied. Robin E. Möser, in addition to providing access to important new documents, offers original interpretations that enrich the study of nuclear politics for historians and political scientists. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (U Chicago Press, 2024) explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 'We Want Better Education!': The 1960s Chicano Student Movement, School Walkouts, and the Quest for Educational Reform in South Texas (Texas A&M UP, 2023), James B. Barrera offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the educational, cultural, and political issues of the Chicano Movement in Texas, which remains one of the lesser-known social and political efforts of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This movement became the political training ground for greater Chicano empowerment for students. By the 1970s, it was these students who helped to organize La Raza Unida Party in Texas. This book explores the conditions faced by students of Mexican origin in public schools throughout the South Texas region, including Westside San Antonio, Edcouch-Elsa, Kingsville, and Crystal City.  Barrera focuses on the relationship of Chicano students and their parents with the school systems and reveals the types of educational deficiencies faced by such students that led to greater political activism. He also shows how school-related issues became an important element of the students' political and cultural struggle to gain a quality education and equal treatment. Protests enabled students and their supporters to gain considerable political leverage in the decision-making process of their schools. Barrera incorporates information collected from archives throughout the state of Texas, including statistical data, government documents, census information, oral history accounts, and legal records. Of particular note are the in-depth interviews he conducted with numerous former students and community activists who participated or witnessed the various "walkouts" or student protests. "We Want Better Education!" is a major contribution to the historiography of social movements, Mexican American studies, and twentieth-century Texas and American history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100,000 Native American people from rural to urban areas. At the time the program ended, many groups--from government leaders to Red Power activists--had already classified it as a failure, and scholars have subsequently positioned the program as evidence of America’s enduring settler-colonial project. But Douglas K. Miller, Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University, argues in Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century(The University of North Carolina Press, 2019), that a richer story should be told--one that recognizes Indigenous mobility in terms of its benefits and not merely its costs. In their collective refusal to accept marginality and destitution on reservations, Native Americans used the urban relocation program to take greater control of their socioeconomic circumstances. Indigenous migrants also used the financial, educational, and cultural resources they found in cities to feed new expressions of Indigenous sovereignty both off and on the reservation. The dynamic histories of everyday people at the heart of this book shed new light on the adaptability of mobile Native American communities. In the end, this is a story of shared experience across tribal lines, through which Indigenous people incorporated urban life into their ideas for Indigenous futures. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Tactical Air Power and the Vietnam War: Explaining Effectiveness in Modern Air Warfare (Cambridge UP, 2023) introduces a much-needed theory of tactical air power to explain air power effectiveness in modern warfare with a particular focus on the Vietnam War as the first and largest modern air war. Phil Haun shows how in the Rolling Thunder, Commando Hunt, and Linebacker air campaigns, independently air power repeatedly failed to achieve US military and political objectives. In contrast, air forces in combined arms operations succeeded more often than not. In addition to predicting how armies will react to a lethal air threat, he identifies operational factors of air superiority, air-to-ground capabilities, and friendly ground force capabilities, along with environmental factors of weather, lighting, geography and terrain, and cover and concealment in order to explain air power effectiveness. The book concludes with analysis of modern air warfare since Vietnam along with an assessment of tactical air power relevance now and for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

This is part #3 of a the (ir)Rational Alaskans, a Cited Podcast mini-series that re-examines the legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the last episode of the (ir)Rational Alaskans, Riki Ott, Linden O’Toole, and thousands of other Alaskan fishers won over $5 billion in punitive damages against Exxon for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In our finale, while Ott and O’Toole wait for their cheques, Exxon fights back with a legal and academic appeal. In that appeal, they marshal some of the most-respected scholars of our generation. The (ir)Rational Alaskans is a partnership with Canada’s National Observer. You can also read about this story in Jacobin. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. Programming Note: This marks the end of our returning season, the Rationality Wars. We will back with another season shortly, sometime this fall. If you want to catch that season, make sure to stay subscribed to our podcast feed (Apple, Spotify, RSS). You can also stay updated by following us on X (@citedpodcast), and you can contact us directly at info [at] citedmedia.ca if you have any questions or any feedback. Finally, if you are impatient and just itching for more content, check out some of our other episodes, like: the other episodes in this season, if you joined up late; the episodes from last season, especially America's Chernobyl; or some of the highlights from our other podcast, Darts and Letters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Plot elements such as adventure, travel to far-flung regions, the criminal underworld, and embezzlement schemes are not usually associated with Soviet literature, yet an entire body of work produced between the October Revolution and the Stalinist Great Terror was constructed around them. In Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921-1938 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) Cassio de Oliveira sheds light on the picaresque and its marginal characters - rogues and storytellers - who populated the Soviet Union on paper and in real life. The picaresque afforded authors the means to articulate and reflect on the Soviet collective identity, a class-based utopia that rejected imperial power and attempted to deemphasize national allegiances. Combining new readings of canonical works with in-depth analysis of neglected texts, Writing Rogues explores the proliferation of characters left on the sidelines of the communist transition, including gangsters, con men, and petty thieves, many of them portrayed as ethnic minorities. The book engages with scholarship on Soviet subjectivity as well as classical picaresque literature in order to explain how the subversive rogue - such as Ilf and Petrov’s wildly popular cynic and schemer Ostap Bender - in the process of becoming a fully fledged Soviet citizen, came to expose and embody the contradictions of Soviet life itself. Writing Rogues enriches our understanding of how literature was called upon to participate in the construction of Soviet identity. It demonstrates that the Soviet picaresque resonated with individual citizens’ fears and aspirations as it recorded the country’s transformation into the first communist state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Indians, their former British rulers asserted, were unfit to rule themselves. Behind this assertion lay a foundational claim about the absence of peoplehood in India. The purported “backwardness” of Indians as a people led to a democratic legitimation of empire, justifying self-government at home and imperial rule in the colonies. In response, Indian anticolonial thinkers launched a searching critique of the modern ideal of peoplehood. Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (Harvard University Press, 2024) is the first account of Indian answers to the question of peoplehood in political theory. This new book by Nazmul Sultan shows how Indian political thinkers explored the fraught theoretical space between sovereignty and government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Surendranath Banerjea and Radhakamal Mukerjee to Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian political thinkers offered novel insights into the globalization of democracy, and ultimately drove India’s twentieth-century political transformation. In this conversation, Sultan talks to host Yi Ning Chang about sovereignty and government, democracy and development, and the intellectual choices that laid the foundation of postcolonial democracy in the mid-twentieth century.  Yi Ning Chang is a PhD Candidate in political theory at the Department of Government at Harvard University. She is writing a dissertation on the end of anticolonial politics. Through a study of 1950s–60s Southeast Asia, the project examines the relationship between critique and action, and the effects anticolonialism had on politics in the postcolony. She has wider interests in the history of twentieth-century political thought, the politics of resistance, and theory from the postcolonial world. Yi Ning can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

After John A. Macdonald’s death, four Tory prime ministers — each remarkable but all little known — rose to power and fell in just five years. From 1891 to 1896, between John A. Macdonald’s and Wilfrid Laurier’s tenures, four lesser-known men took on the mantle of leadership. Tory prime ministers John Abbott, John Thompson, Mackenzie Bowell, and Charles Tupper headed the government of Canada in rapid succession. Each came to the job with qualifications and limitations, and each left after unexpectedly short terms. Yet these reluctant prime ministers are an important part of our political legacy. Their roles were much more than caretakers between the administrations of two great leaders. Personal tragedy, terrible health issues, backstabbing, and political manipulation all led to their eventual downfalls. The Lost Prime Ministers: Macdonald's Successors Abbott, Thompson, Bowell, and Tupper (Dundurn, 2022) is the dramatic saga of these overlooked Canadian leaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Princess Izabela Czartoryska was a towering figure of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century European cultural and intellectual life. Married at sixteen to a distinguished older aristocrat, she amassed learning, influence, and a role in both Polish and European statecraft through encounters with figures ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Joseph II of Austria. After the liquidation of her homeland’s sovereignty with its third partition in 1795, she spent the final decades of her life pioneering and curating spaces of preservation, both of Polish nationhood and of the human experience writ large.  Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess (William Collins, 2024) is her definitive biography, penned by distinguished historian Adam Zamoyski—the protagonist’s great-great-great-grandson. Trawling through a vast family archive and arcane sources in half a dozen languages, Zamoyski has told her story as one of empowerment, education, and encounter in an age of profound national and international upheaval. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Nearly 50 years since the European Foreign Ministers issued their first declaration on the conflict between Israel and Palestine in 1971, the European Union continues to have close political and economic ties with the region. Based exclusively on primary sources, Anders Persson's EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967-2019 (Edinburgh UP, 2020) offers an up-to-date overview of the European Union’s involvement in the Israeli-Arab conflict since 1967. This study uses an innovative conceptual methodology to examine keyword frequency in a sample of more than 2300 declarations and statements published in the Bulletin of the European Communities/European Union (1967–2009) as well as council reports and press interviews (2009–2018) to uncover broad patterns for qualitative analysis. The study suggests that the Israeli-Arab conflict is more important to the EU than any other conflict, having been key to shaping EU’s foreign policy overall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Since the mid-nineteenth century, public officials, reformers, journalists, and other elites have referred to “the labour question.” The labour question was rooted in the system of wage labour that spread throughout much of Europe and its colonies and produced contending classes as industrialization unfolded. Answers to the Labour Question explores how the liberal state responded to workers’ demands that employers recognize trade unions as their legitimate representatives in their struggle for compensation and control over the workplace. In Answers to the Labour Question: Industrial Relations and the State in the Anglophone World, 1880–1945 (University of Toronto Press, 2024), Dr. Gary Mucciaroni examines five Anglophone nations – Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States – whose differences are often overlooked in the literature on political economy, which lumps them together as liberal, “market-led” economies. Despite their many shared characteristics and common historical origins, these nations’ responses to the labour question diverged dramatically. Dr. Mucciaroni identifies the factors that explain why these nations developed such different industrial relations regimes and how the paths each nation took to the adoption of its regime reflected a different logic of institutional change. Drawing on newspaper accounts, parliamentary debates, and personal memoirs, among other sources, Answers to the Labour Question aims to understand the variety of state responses to industrial unrest and institutional change beyond the domain of industrial relations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 2003, in a ruling that bordered on poetic, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Lawrence v. Texas that sexual behavior between consenting adults was protected under the constitutional right to privacy. This was a landmark case in the course of LGBTQ+ rights in the Untied States, laying the groundwork for cases like 2015's Obergefell v. Hodges. Yet, this case did not emerge out of nowhere.  In Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement (U Texas Press, 2023), University of North Texas history professor Wesley Phelps argues that behind each successful court case stands a litany of failures, challenges, and individual human stories, each of which laid the groundwork for these landmark successes. By tracking the long history of queer activism in Texas during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Phelps shows how the long road toward greater LGBTQ+ civil rights was paved with hard work by hundreds of activists, lawyers, and allies. No movement exists in a vacuum, and Before Lawrence v. Texas provides a roadmap showing how historical change really occurs.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, "slaves of the state" were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system. In Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (U Chicago Press, 2024), Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn's prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back--with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman's unforgettable story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery "except as a punishment for crime"--and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom. Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine (Hurst, 2024) by Christopher Beckman takes readers on a tantalising voyage through European and American gastronomic history, following the trail of a small but mighty fish: the anchovy. Whether in ubiquitous Roman garum, mass-produced British condiments, elaborate French haute cuisine or modern Spanish tapas, anchovies have been enhancing the flavour of many dishes for thousands of years. Yet, depending upon the time and place—and who was eating them—they have also been disdained as worthless little fish, deemed too small, bony and inconsequential for popular or elite consumption. From Western Europe to the USA, Beckman shows how the evolving and ambiguous position of anchovies provides surprising insights into the relationship between food, class and status throughout history. Drawing on cookbooks, literature and art, this is the hidden story of the diminutive anchovy, and its outsized role in shaping the West’s cuisine. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, New York State was a hotbed of change. Cities grew as immigrants arrived from Europe and African Americans trekked up from the South. Corporations grew in power and women fought for the right to vote. In political speeches, muckraking journalism, and expert reports, New Yorkers argued out the issues of what came to be called The Progressive Era—a period of social and political and change that sparked a range of reform movements. The era and its causes loomed large in New York State, and the reforms fought out and enacted in New York were central to the Progressive Era nationwide. In Progressive New York: Change and Reform in the Empire State, 1900-1920: A Reader (SUNY Press, 2024), Bruce Dearstyne has gathered a wealth of documents that bring to life the issues, ideas and passions of this important era. Dearstyne has written widely on New York State history and worked in many capacities to document and explore the history of the Empire State. He was a professor at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, where he still serves as an adjunct professor. Host Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of journalism, and American Studies at Rutgers University. His latest book, When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers, is due out in March 2025 from Cornell University Press. Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The first comprehensive, comparative study of the 'Jewish Councils' in the Netherlands, Belgium and France during Nazi rule. In the postwar period, there was extensive focus on these organisations' controversial role as facilitators of the Holocaust. They were seen as instruments of Nazi oppression, aiding the process of isolating and deporting the Jews they were ostensibly representing. As a result, they have chiefly been remembered as forms of collaboration.  Using a wide range of sources including personal testimonies, diaries, administrative documents and trial records, Laurien Vastenhout demonstrates that the nature of the Nazi regime, and its outlook on these bodies, was far more complex. She sets the conduct of the Councils' leaders in their prewar and wartime social and situational contexts and provides a thorough understanding of their personal contacts with the Germans and clandestine organisations. Between Community and Collaboration: 'Jewish Councils' in Western Europe under Nazi Occupation (Cambridge UP, 2022) reveals what German intentions with these organisations were during the course of the occupation, and allows for a deeper understanding of the different ways in which the Holocaust unfolded in each of these countries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world. Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2023) explores the global history of Chinese script reforms--efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system--from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures. Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670-1825 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony. The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution’s development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them. Throughout South Carolina’s long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 330 BC, Alexander the Great conquers the city of Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. His troops later burn it to the ground, capping centuries of tensions between the Hellenistic Greeks and Macedonians and the Persians. That event kicks off Rachel Kousser’s book Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great (Mariner Books, 2024), which tells the story of how Alexander—the unbeaten military genius and the most powerful man in that part of the world—decided to keep going, chasing rebellious ex-Persians and launching an unprecedented invasion of India. But what drove Alexander to keep marching? What was the kind of empire Alexander wanted to build? And why did he eventually turn back at the Indus River, his soldiers begging for him to return home? Rachel Kousser is the chair of the Classics department at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and a professor of ancient art and archaeology at Brooklyn College. She is also the author of The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture: Interaction, Transformation, Destruction (Cambridge University Press: 2017) and Hellenistic and Roman Ideal Sculpture: The Allure of the Classical (Cambridge University Press: 2008). She can be followed on Instagram at @rkousser. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Alexander at the End of the World. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

How did ideas of masculinity shape the British legal profession and the wider expectations of the white-collar professional? Brotherhood of Barristers: A Cultural History of the British Legal Profession, 1840–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Ren Pepitone examines the cultural history of the Inns of Court – four legal societies whose rituals of symbolic brotherhood took place in their supposedly ancient halls. These societies invented traditions to create a sense of belonging among members – or, conversely, to marginalise those who did not fit the profession's ideals. Dr. Pepitone examines the legal profession's efforts to maintain an exclusive, masculine culture in the face of sweeping social changes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Utilising established sources such as institutional records alongside diaries, guidebooks, and newspapers, this book looks afresh at the gendered operations of Victorian professional life. Brotherhood of Barristers incorporates a diverse array of historical actors, from the bar's most high-flying to struggling law students, disbarred barristers, political radicals, and women's rights campaigners. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The problems that gave rise to the widespread desire to introduce a common currency were myriad. While trade was able to cope with-and even to benefit from-the parallel circulation of many different types of coin, it nevertheless harmed both the common people and the political authorities. The authorities in particular suffered from neighbours who used their comparatively good money as raw material to mint poor imitations. Debasing their own coinage provided an, at best, short-term solution. Over the medium and long term, it drove the members of the Empire into rounds of competitive debasements, until they realised that a common currency was the only answer that addressed the core of the problem. In The Silver Empire: How Germany Created Its First Common Currency (Oxford University Press, 2024) Dr. Oliver Volckart examines the conditions that shaped the monetary outlook of the member states of the Empire, paying particular attention to the uneven access to silver and gold. Following closely the negotiations that prepared the common currency, he is able to illuminate the interest groups that were formed, what their agendas and ulterior motives were, how alliances were forged, and how it was eventually possible to obtain majority agreement on what a common currency should look like: a silver-based currency that was introduced in 1559-66. In fact, in contrast to what historians once believed, the common currency they achieved turns out to have functioned not significantly worse than other currencies of the time: it had similar problems and similar advantages as the money issued by more centralised governments. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In post-war Europe, protest was everywhere. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Paris to Prague, Milan to Wroclaw, ordinary people took to the streets, fighting for a better world. Their efforts came to a head most dramatically in 1968 and 1989, when mass movements swept Europe and rewrote its history.  In the decades between, Joachim C. Haberlen argues in Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe (Penguin, 2023), new movements emerged that transformed the nature of protesting. Activism moved beyond traditional demonstrations, from squatting to staging 'happenings' and camping out at nuclear power plants. People protested in the way they dressed, the music they listened to, the lovers they slept with, the clubs where they danced all night. New movements were born, notably anti-racism, women's liberation, gay liberation and environmentalism. And protest turned inward, as activists experimented with new ways of living and feeling, from communes to group therapy, in their efforts to live a better life in the here and now. Some of these struggles succeeded, others failed. But successful or not, their history provides a glimpse into roads not taken, into futures that did not happen. The stories in Haberlen's book invite us to imagine different futures; to struggle, to fail, and to try again. In a time when we are told that there are no alternatives, they show us that there could be another way. Joachim C. Häberlen is a historian of modern Europe. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and worked until 2022 at the University of Warwick; he now lives and works in Berlin. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In what has become perhaps the most infamous example of modern anti-Jewish violence prior to the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom should have been a small story lost to us along with scores of other similar tragedies. Instead, Kishinev became an event of international intrigue, and lives on as the paradigmatic pogrom – a symbol of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The facts of the event are simple: over the course of three days in a Russian town, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or injured by their neighbors, a thousand Jewish-owned houses and stores destroyed. What concerns Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2018) is less what happened and more the legacy, reception, and interpretation of those facts, both at the time and today. Pogrom is a study of the ways in which the events of Kishinev in 1903 astonishingly acted as a catalyst for leftist politics, new forms of anti-semitism, and the creation of an international involvement with the lives of Russian Jews. In an introduction that sets the context of Russian-Jewish life at the opening of the 20th century, and five essay like chapters that follow, Professor Zipperstein uses different types of sources, marshaled from archives across the world in concert with well known accounts, to weave together a study of the ways in which the pogrom has been received and imagined from a myriad of different perspectives. A poetic memorialization by the man that would become the “national poet” of Israel, Haim Nachman Bialik, based on his eyewitness account, a journalistic investigation by Michael Davitt in Within the Pale: The True Story of the Anti-Semitic Persecutions in Russia culled from newspaper reports published around the world, as well as previously unknown connections to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and to American radical politics. We read of an provincial event that captured the imagination of an international community, Jew and non-Jew alike, and provided them with a peephole into the lives of Russian Jewry. In many ways, this reception was paradoxical: by some, Jews were perceived as victims of popular violence, while others saw them as masterminds of a media-driven conspiracy. In an age where much of our relationship with world events is shaped by often times contradictory media perspectives, Pogrom speaks to the ways in which this operates and its unwitting consequences. Here, Kishinev does not represent a pristine memory of a single story but rather exposes many of the historical trends of the 20th century and helps us further understand the relationships between media and power, between violence and empathy, and the ways in which we come to understand the unfolding narratives around us. Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, if both Descartes and my mother are correct then I am not. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In historical writing on World War I, Czech-speaking soldiers serving in the Austro-Hungarian military are typically studied as Czechs, rarely as soldiers, and never as men. As a result, the question of these soldiers' imperial loyalties has dominated the historical literature to the exclusion of any debate on their identities and experiences. Men Under Fire: Motivation, Morale, and Masculinity among Czech Soldiers in the Great War, 1914–1918 (Berghahn Books, 2019) provides a groundbreaking analysis of this oft-overlooked cohort, drawing on a wealth of soldiers' private writings to explore experiences of exhaustion, sex, loyalty, authority, and combat itself. It combines methods from history, gender studies, and military science to reveal the extent to which the Great War challenged these men's senses of masculinity, and to which the resulting dynamics influenced their attitudes and loyalties. Jiří Hutečka is an Associate Professor at the Institute of History, University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic.  Steven Seegel is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Provincial Democracy: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire in Twentieth-century South India (Cambridge UP, 2023) delves into the period between the decline of empire and the rise of the Indian nation-state in the context of seismic global transformations of the early twentieth century-namely the two World Wars and the crisis of the imperial order. Rama Sundari Mantena argues this period is defined by not only the dominance of the nation state and debates over a new global order, but also mass participation in defining and negotiating the form and substance of democratic political futures. Mantena recovers this debate by reconstructing the emerging vocabularies of liberalism, political rights, and self-government in colonial South India, especially in the princely domain of Hyderabad and among Andhra speakers in British India’s Madras province. Provincial Democracy shifts the focus from the dominant narrative of linguistic nationalism as defining regionalism to debates over questions of representation, rights, political reforms, and federalism. Thus, it uncovers a broad perspective on political imaginaries that anticipated democracy in independent India. Rama Mantena is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her first book The Origins of Modern Historiography in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) explored everyday practices surrounding acts of collecting, surveying, and antiquarianism in the early period of British colonial rule in India. Anindita Ghosh is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her dissertation is about the histories of absorption of the eastern native states of South Asia into the nations and their socio-political afterlives in the post-colonial nations. Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. His recent publications include co-edited volumes on Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Staging the Sacred: Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the importance of Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity through the lenses of performance, entertainment, and spectacle. Laura Lieber proposes an account of hymnody as a performative and theatrical genre, combining religious and theatrical studies to examine how performers creatively engaged their audiences, utilized different modes of performance, and created complex characters through their speeches. To truly consider performance and engage with these poems fully, Lieber urges readers to imagine the world beyond the page. While poetry and hymnody from Late Antiquity are usually presented in textual form, Lieber moves away from studying the text on its own, engaging instead with how these poems would have been performed and acted. The specific literary techniques associated with oratory and acting in Late Antiquity, such as apostrophe and vivid imagery, help craft a more accurate idea of liturgical presentations. Lieber suggests ways that these ancient poets could have used their physical spaces of performance by borrowing from the gestures and body language of oratory, mime, and pantomime. A highly interdisciplinary study that will appeal to scholars across religion, theatre, literature, and beyond, Staging the Sacred proposes a novel interpretation of Late Antique hymnody and poetry as a performative genre, akin to oratory, theatre, and other modes of public performance, placing these works in their wider societal context. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review. Laura S. Lieber is the inaugural chair and Professor of the Transregional History of Religion at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Michael Motia in a Lecturer in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From Schmelt Camp to "Little Auschwitz" Blechhammer's Role in the Holocaust (Purdue UP, 2024) is the first in-depth study of the second largest Auschwitz subcamp, Blechhammer (Blachownia Śląska), and its lesser known yet significant prehistory as a so-called Schmelt camp, a forced labor camp for Jews operating outside the concentration camp system. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents and a wide array of survivor testimonies, the book provides novel findings on Blechhammer's role in the Holocaust in Eastern Upper Silesia, a formerly Polish territory annexed to Nazi Germany in the fall of 1939, where 120,000 Jews lived. Established in the spring of 1942 to construct a synthetic fuel plant, the camp's abhorrent living conditions led to the death of thousands of young Jews conscripted from the ghettos or taken off deportation convoys from Western Europe. Blechhammer was not only used for selecting parts of the Jewish ghetto population for Auschwitz, but also for killing pregnant women and babies. As an Auschwitz satellite, Blechhammer became the scene of brutal executions and massacres of prisoners refusing to go on the Death March. This microhistory unearths the far-reaching complicity of often overlooked perpetrators, such as the industrialists, factory guards, policemen, and "ordinary" civilians in these atrocities, but more importantly, it focuses on the victims, reconstructing the prisoners' daily life and suffering, as well as their survival strategies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What did going to the movies sound like back in the “silent film” era? The answer takes us on a strange journey through Vaudeville, roaming Chautauqua lectures, penny arcades, nickelodeons, and grand movie palaces. As our guest In today’s episode, pioneering scholar of film sound, Rick Altman, tells us, the silent era has a lot to teach us about why sound works the way it does at the movies today. And as our other guest, sound and film historian Eric Dienstfrey tells us, “What we think of today as standard practice is far from inevitable.” In fact, some of the practices we’ll hear about are downright wacky.  Audiences today give little thought to the relationship between sound and images at the movies. When we hear a character’s footsteps or inner thoughts or hear a rousing orchestral score that the character can’t hear, it all seems natural. Yet these are all conventions that had to be developed by filmmakers and accepted by audiences. And as Altman and Dienstfrey show us, the use of sound at the movies could have developed very differently. Dr. Rick Altman is Professor Emeritus of Cinema and Comparative Literature in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa. Altman is known for his work on genre theory, the musical, media sound, and video pedagogy. He is the author of Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), Film/Genre (Bloomsbury, 1999), and A Theory of Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Dr. Eric Dienstfrey is Postdoctoral Fellow in American Music at the University of Texas at Austin. Eric is a historian of sound, cinema, and media technology. His paper “The Myth of the Speakers: A Critical Reexamination of Dolby History” won the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award for best article of the year in 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the lead-up to every election cycle, pundits predict that Latino Americans will overwhelmingly vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. And it’s true—Latino voters do tilt Democratic. Hillary Clinton won the Latino vote in a “landslide,” Barack Obama “crushed” Mitt Romney among Latino voters in his reelection, and, four years earlier, the Democratic ticket beat the McCain-Palin ticket by a margin of more than two to one. But those numbers belie a more complicated picture. Because of decades of investment and political courtship, as well as a nuanced and varied cultural identity, the Republican party has had a much longer and stronger bond with Hispanics. How is this possible for a party so associated with draconian immigration and racial policies? In The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump (Ecco, 2020), historian and political commentator Geraldo Cadava illuminates the history of the millions of Hispanic Republicans who, since the 1960s, have had a significant impact on national politics. Intertwining the little understood history of Hispanic Americans with a cultural study of how post–World War II Republican politicians actively courted the Hispanic vote during the Cold War (especially Cuban émigrés) and during periods of major strife in Central America (especially during Iran-Contra), Cadava offers insight into the complicated dynamic between Latino liberalism and conservatism, which, when studied together, shine a crucial light on a rapidly changing demographic that will impact American elections for years to come. Tiffany Jasmin González is an AAUW Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate of History at Texas A&M University. Her research centers on the 20th-century US, Latinx history, American politics, social movements, borderlands, and women & gender. Her dissertation, Representation for a Change: Women in Government and the Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement in Texas. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Well into the early nineteenth century, Luanda, the administrative capital of Portuguese Angola, was one of the most influential ports for the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1801 and 1850, it served as the point of embarkation for more than 535,000 enslaved Africans. In the history of this diverse, wealthy city, the gendered dynamics of the merchant community have frequently been overlooked. Vanessa S. Oliveira traces how existing commercial networks adapted to changes in the Atlantic slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century. Slave Trade and Abolition: Gender, Commerce, and Economic Transition in Luanda (U Wisconsin Press, 2021) reveals how women known as donas (a term adapted from the title granted to noble and royal women in the Iberian Peninsula) were often important cultural brokers. Acting as intermediaries between foreign and local people, they held high socioeconomic status and even competed with the male merchants who controlled the trade. Oliveira provides rich evidence to explore the many ways this Luso-African community influenced its society. In doing so, she reveals an unexpectedly nuanced economy with regard to the dynamics of gender and authority. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The specter of the “Godless” Soviet Union haunted the United States and continental Western Europe throughout the Cold War, but what did atheism mean in the Soviet Union? What was its relationship with religion? In her new book, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, Dr. Victoria Smolkin explores how the Soviet state defined and created spaces for atheism during its nearly 70-year history. The Soviet state often found itself devising reactions to religion in terms of belief and practice. Religion, particularly Orthodox religion, was an ideological, political and spiritual problem for the state. The state, particularly during the Khrushchev era, needed to fill the ideological and spiritual void the absence of religion created in the hearts and minds of Soviet people. From the Soviet League of the Militant Godless to a cosmonaut wedding in the Moscow Wedding Palace, Smolkin’s use of primary sources effectively illustrates just how diverse the meaning of atheism could be from Lenin to Gorbachev. Smolkin’s work goes beyond the traditional accounts of Soviet atheism as a symptom of authoritarianism or as a secularization project to show that Soviet atheism’s purpose was fundamentally tied to the fate religion. Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation, 1740-1940 (Manchester UP, 2023) features new research on Russia's historic relationship with Asia and the ways it was mediated and represented in the fine, decorative and performing arts and architecture from the mid-eighteenth century to the first two decades of Soviet rule. It interrogates how Russia's perception of its position on the periphery of the west and its simultaneous self-consciousness as a colonial power shaped its artistic, cultural and national identity as a heterogenous, multi-ethnic empire. It also explores the extent to which cultural practitioners participated in the discursive matrices that advanced Russia's colonial machinery on the one hand and critiqued and challenged it on the other, especially in territories that were themselves on the fault lines between the east and the west. Maria Taroutina is Associate Professor of Art History and Slavic Studies at Brown University. Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art and Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Despite Haiti's proximity to the United States, and its considerable importance to our own history, Haiti barely registered in the historic consciousness of most Americans until recently. Those who struggled to understand Haiti's suffering in the earthquake of 2010 often spoke of it as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, but could not explain how it came to be so. In recent years, the amount of scholarship about the island has increased dramatically. Whereas once this scholarship was focused on Haiti's political or military leaders, now the historiography of Haiti features lively debates and different schools of thought. Even as this body of knowledge has developed, it has been hard for students to grasp its various strands.  Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012) presents the best of the recent articles on Haitian history, by both Haitian and foreign scholars, moving from colonial Saint Domingue to the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. It will be the go-to one-volume introduction to the field of Haitian history, helping to explain how the promise of the Haitian Revolution dissipated, and presenting the major debates and questions in the field today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A vibrant urban settlement from mediaeval times and the royal seat of the Safavid dynasty, the city of Isfahan emerged as a great metropolis during the seventeenth century. Using key sources, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024) reconstructs the spaces and senses of this dynamic city. Focusing on nuances of urban experience, Dr. Farshid Emami expands our understanding of Isfahan in a global context. He takes the reader on an evocative journey through the city’s markets, promenades, and coffeehouses, bringing to life the social landscapes that animated the lives of urban dwellers and shaped their perceptions of themselves and the world. In doing so, Emami reveals seventeenth-century Isfahan as more than a cluster of beautiful monuments and gardens. It was a cosmopolitan city, where senses and materials, nature and artifice, and ritual and sociability acted in unison, engendering urban experiences that became paramount across the globe during the early modern period. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth’s surface come from, and what kinds of complexities are hidden behind that seemingly straightforward definition? The Birth of Territory (U Chicago Press, 2013) provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, Stuart Elden examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding. Elden addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players—historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists—and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth’s surface is divided, controlled, and administered. Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Lesley Smith of Oxford University joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Fragments of a World: William of Auvergne and His Medieval Life (University of Chicago Press, 2023). It has been 140 years since a full biography of William of Auvergne (1180?-1249), which may come as a surprise, given that William was an important gateway of Greek and Arabic thought and philosophy to western Europe in the thirteenth century, and one of the earliest writers in the medieval Latin west on demonology. Lesley Smith's aims in this book are two-fold: first, to take a closer look at William, the human being, how he saw the world and his place in it; and to uncover William's interactions with his Parisian congregation through the nearly 600 sermons he left after his death.  Smith has mined these writings, unremarked in previous scholarship, to give us a different perspective on the schoolmaster, bishop of Paris, and strict theologian we have come to know: a preacher who spoke and ministered not just to the powerful and elite, but also to commoners, to the poor, and to the less fortunate. Through a study of the sermons, Smith creates a broader landscape of William's thought and life, highlighting his attention to the importance--and limits--of language, and his attempts to find a way to address the concerns of the larger populace. In his preaching, we get a sense of the balance William achieved, in the way he communicated religious teachings, in his understanding of the concerns of ordinary Parisians, and in his awareness of the ebb and flow of daily life in a medieval city. The book will interest scholars of intellectual history and philosophy, religion, and literary studies more broadly for Smith's innovative method of excavating the sermons in pursuit of William the person, and his humanity. An altogether "new" William for the twenty-first century.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Political Scientist Heath Brown’s new book, Roadblocked: Joe Biden's Rocky Transition to the Presidency (UP of Kansas, 2024), examines the presidential transition between the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration in late 2020 and into 2021. Presidential transitions are not all that frequent, since presidents who are re-elected do not need to go through a transition to their second term. Thus, while there have been over forty presidents, there have been far fewer transitions. And until January 6, 2021, the history of transitions has been marked by the peaceful change of power between presidents and parties. While Brown is not focusing on January 6, 2021, he is analyzing the unique transition between Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden, and their respective administrations, and how that particular transition did not necessarily reflect the institutional norms of previous presidential transitions. Roadblocked tells two stories about the roadblocks. There were the external roadblocks, which came from the various ways in which the transition from Trump to Biden was stymied by members of the Executive branch, including the Director of the Government Services Administration (GSA) and the legal process of ascertainment, as well as principals who were uncooperative with the incoming team. There were also internal roadblocks within the Biden transition team itself, which also contributed to the rocky start of the new administration. Brown delineates the oddity of how the transition itself works—which is generally secretive and private. There are general discussions of transitions in political science and history, in terms of what is supposed to happen during this process, when those leaving positions and those entering positions generally sit side by side to learn the ins and outs of the position from the person holding that position. But the Biden transition also took place during the depths of the COVID-19 crisis, before vaccines were available, so much of the transition was virtual, another twist to the already complicated process. The areas where the Biden transition team met with the most difficulty from the outgoing administration was with regard to the budgeting process and the Office of Management and Budget, and with the Intelligence, Foreign Policy, and Defense sectors. The appointees who ran these parts of the Executive branch were the least cooperative, and generally dismissive of the incoming Biden appointees. For the rest of the Executive branch, which is vast, there was generally good cooperation at most levels. In terms of the internal difficulties, there were great concerns about technological vulnerabilities and the potential for hacking. This led to a kind of fragmented dynamic within the transition team, since there was a lot of siloing and not a lot of coordination. Given the abbreviated timeline, the general secrecy that goes on with presidential transitions, and the fact that much of this transition was taking place virtually, with members of the team distributed around the country (as well as in other countries), this all contributed to an internal discombobulation in terms of the transition. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Over the course of the Almoravid (1040–1147) and Almohad (1121–1269) dynasties, mediaeval Marrakesh evolved from an informal military encampment into a thriving metropolis that attempted to translate a local and distinctly rural past into a broad, imperial architectural vernacular. In Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Abbey Stockstill convincingly demonstrates that the city’s surrounding landscape provided the principal mode of negotiation between these identities. The contours of mediaeval Marrakesh were shaped in the twelfth-century transition between the two empires of Berber origin. These dynasties constructed their imperial authority through markedly different approaches to urban space, reflecting their respective concerns in communicating complex identities that fluctuated between paradigmatically Islamic and distinctly local. Using interdisciplinary methodologies to reconstruct this urban environment, Dr. Stockstill broadens the analysis of Marrakesh’s mediaeval architecture to explore the interrelated interactions among the city’s monuments and its highly resonant landscape. Marrakesh and the Mountains integrates Marrakesh into the context of urbanism in the wider Islamic world and grants the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties agency over the creation and instantiation of their imperial capital. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A sweeping account of how small wars shaped global order in the age of empires. Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton UP, 2024) is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces ensured an easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined "small" violence as essential to imperial rule and global order. Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how the imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Queer Obscenity: Erotic Archives in Dictatorial Spain (Stanford University Press, 2024) takes us inside the archive to demonstrate how the incongruities of the Primo de Rivera (1923–1930) and Franco (1939–1975) regimes were manifested in the regulation of erotic material cultures. Focusing on amateur pornographers and their confiscated and censored erotica, this book adds a rich complexity to both the history and theory of pornography, demonstrating that surveillance depends entirely on documenting intimacy and preserving transgression. This book sheds new light on the production, consumption, and circulation of pornography and erotica in Spain over the course of the twentieth century, drawing connections between intimate queer desires, preservation, and erasure. Javier Fernández-Galeano is Ramón y Cajal postdoctoral fellow at Universitat de València in Spain. Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

This June 2020 episode, originally part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book's first exploration of police brutality, systemic and personal racism and Black Lives Matter. Elizabeth and John were lucky to be joined by Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham, two scholars who have worked on these questions for decades. Many of the mechanisms that create an oppressed and subordinated American community of color can seem subtle and indirect, despite the insidious ways they pervade housing law (The Color of Law), education (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together, Savage Inequalities) and the carceral state (The Condemnation of Blackness, The New Jim Crow, Locking Up Our Own). Although there is plenty of subtle racism in policing as well, there can be a brutally frontal quality to white-power policing: just look at the racial disparity in the stubbornly astronomically number of fatal shootings by police. David and Daniel ask how much of the current system of racial and class disparity can be traced back to slavery or to subsequent 19th century racial logic, and howw much arises from the confluence of other forces. The conversation notes the widespread white participation in 2020 protests–did we ever expect to hear Mitt Romney chanting “Black Lives Matter”?– and what this might suggest about the possibilities for actual change. It also touches on the roles of the media and institutions such as police unions and the erosion of federal oversight of local police departments. Mentioned in this episode: Klansville, USA (cf. the PBS show of the same name that drew heavily on the book; and an interview David did on the topic of today’s Klan) Kerner Commission Report (1968) Ethical Society of Police (cf. this compelling local post-Ferguson PBS documentary that speaks with St. Louis African-American police officers) Recallable Books Walter Johnson, “The Broken Heart of America” (2020) James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time” (1963) Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me” (2015) Listen and Read Here: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Who was James Madison? Why were his Notes on Government so valuable to the American founding? Did James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington all achieve what Sheehan calls “Civic Friendship”? Colleen Sheehan joins Madison’s Notes to discuss her seminal works on James Madison: The Mind of James Madison: The Legacy of Classical Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Colleen Sheehan is a former Republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. A former, longtime member of the Villanova University faculty, she is currently a professor of politics and ethics in the Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Deep Time: A Literary History (Princeton UP, 2023), Noah Heringman, Curators’ Professor of English at the University of Missouri, presents a “counter-history” of deep time. This counter-history acknowledges and investigates the literary and imaginary origins of the idea of deep time, from eighteen-century narratives of voyages around the world to William Blake’s ballads and writings by Charles Darwin. This approach to the idea of deep time and the history of its formation engages with contemporary debates over the concept of an “Anthropocene” and the more general problem of sequencing and understanding the Earth’s time.  The book’s main contribution is to show that the idea of deep time is not exclusively a scientific and geologic concept. In order to be properly understood and responsibly used, this idea needs to be approached as “a field of imagination,” which has been shaped by the entangled histories of exploration, colonialism, natural sciences, archeology, and literary forms. Deep Time is both a surprising exploration of the forms that “the fantasy of a legible earth history” took between the eighteen and the nineteenth centuries and an invitation to reflect on how these forms might have left their marks on our current attempts at framing the depth and strangeness of the Earth’s time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

When General Porfirio Díaz assumed power in 1876, he ushered in Mexico's first prolonged period of political stability and national economic growth--though "progress" came at the cost of democracy. Indigenous Autocracy presents a new story about how regional actors negotiated between national authoritarian rule and local circumstances by explaining how an Indigenous person held state-level power in Mexico during the thirty-five-year dictatorship that preceded the Mexican Revolution (the Porfiriato), and the apogee of scientific racism across Latin America. Although he was one of few recognizably Indigenous persons in office, Próspero Cahuantzi of Tlaxcala kept his position (1885-1911) longer than any other gubernatorial appointee under Porfirio Díaz's transformative but highly oppressive dictatorship (1876-1911). Cahuantzi leveraged his identity and his region's Indigenous heritage to ingratiate himself to Díaz and other nation-building elites. Locally, Cahuantzi navigated between national directives aimed at modernizing Mexico, often at the expense of the impoverished rural majority, and strategic management of Tlaxcala's natural resources--in particular, balancing growing industrial demand for water with the needs of the local population.  In Indigenous Autocracy: Power, Race, and Resources in Porfirian Tlaxcala, Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2024), Jaclyn Ann Sumner shows how this intermediary actor brokered national expectations and local conditions to maintain state power, challenging the idea that governors during the Porfirian dictatorship were little more than provincial stewards who repressed dissent. Drawing upon documentation from more than a dozen Mexican archives, the book brings Porfirian-era Mexico into critical conversations about race and environmental politics in Latin America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

After India gained independence in 1947, Britain reinvented its role in the global economy through nongovernmental aid organisations. Utilising existing imperial networks and colonial bureaucracy, the nonprofit sector sought an ethical capitalism, one that would equalise relationships between British consumers and Third World producers as the age of empire was ending. The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tehila Sasson examines the role of nonstate actors in the major transformations of the world economy in the postwar era, showing how British NGOs charted a path to neoliberalism in their pursuit of ethical markets. Between the 1950s and 1990s, nonprofits sought to establish an alternative to Keynesianism through their welfare and development programs. Encouraging the fair trade of commodities and goods through microfinance, consumer boycotts, and corporate social responsibility, these programs emphasised decentralisation, privatisation, and entrepreneurship. Tehila Sasson tells the stories of the activists, economists, politicians, and businessmen who reimagined the marketplace as a workshop for global reform. She reveals how their ideas, though commonly associated with conservative neoliberal policies, were part of a nonprofit-driven endeavour by the liberal left to envision markets as autonomous and humanising spaces, facilitating ethical relationships beyond the impersonal realm of the state. Drawing on dozens of newly available repositories from nongovernmental, international, national, and business archives, The Solidarity Economy reconstructs the political economy of these markets—from handicrafts and sugar to tea and coffee—shedding critical light on the post imperial origins of neoliberalism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Film critic Alonso Duralde and I talk his new book, Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film (Running Press, 2024), including some fascinating anecdotes, case studies, and watershed moments in queer cinematic history, not to mention its creators, its stars, its detractors, and its various ebbs and flows -- from as early as Edison sound experiments to the pornographic underground to more recent strides and mainstream representation in the new millennium. Featuring: your gracious host not being able to pronounce "linoleum." Alonso Duralde is Chief US Film Critic for The Film Verdict, author of Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas, and coauthor of I'll Be Home for Christmas Movies. He is the cohost of the Linoleum Knife, Maximum Film!, and Breakfast All Day podcasts, and has discussed film on CNN, PBS, TCM, ABC, and in numerous documentaries. Tyler Thier is a faculty member and administrator in the Department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He regularly writes and teaches cultural criticism, specifically in relation to maligned, dangerous, "poor-taste," and otherwise controversial pieces of film and pop culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Heather Murray is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Dr. Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients' intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films. This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient—as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital—that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the century's end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Movies under the Influence (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) by Dr. Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece charts the entangled histories of moviegoing and mind-altering substances from early cinema through the psychedelic 1970s. Dr. Szczepaniak-Gillece examines how the parallel trajectories of these two enduring aspects of American culture, linked by their ability to influence individual and collective consciousness, resulted in their being treated and regulated in similar ways. Rather than looking at representations of drug use within film, she regards cinema and intoxicants as kindred experiences of immersion subject to corresponding forces of ideology and power. Exploring the effects of intoxicants such as caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, and psychedelics on film spectatorship, Dr. Szczepaniak-Gillece demonstrates how American movie theaters sought to cultivate a dual identity: as both a place of wholesome entertainment and a shadowy zone of illicit behavior. Movies under the Influence highlights the various legislative, legal, and corporate powers that held sway over the darkened anonymity of theaters, locating the convergence of moviegoing and drug use as a site of mediation and social control in America. As much as substances and cinema are points where power intervenes, they are also settings of potential transcendence, and Movies under the Influence maintains this paradox as a necessary component of American film history. Recontextualizing a wide range of films, from Hollywood to the avant-garde, this book examines the implicit relationship intoxicants suggest between mass media, spectatorship, and governmental regulation and offers a new angle from which to understand cinema’s lasting role in evolving American culture. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

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 persecuted, and well-known for their proselytising efforts, they have made a substantial contribution in terms of human rights, and they count numerous famous musicians and sports stars among their membership. I caught up with Zoe Knox, Associate Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Leicester, to discuss her new book, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Secular World: From the 1870s to the Present (Palgrave, 2018), to talk about the ways in which this religious community has changed over time, and how it developed its distinctive attitudes towards politics, blood transfusion, and evangelism. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 (Simon & Schuster, 2018), by Marc Ambinder, is a history of US-Soviet Relations under Ronald Reagan and an exploration of nuclear command and control operations. Ambender weaves together accounts of military exercises, false alarms, and espionage to tell the story of how close the U.S. and the former Soviet Union came to nuclear war in 1983. The Brink is a narrative-style book that also details the evolution of U.S. nuclear war decision-making practices, continuity of government planning, and U.S. interactions with NATO and allies in during the 1980s. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Britain and Russia maintained a frosty civility for a few years after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. But, by the 1820s, their relations degenerated into constant acrimonious rivalry over Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia--the Great Game--and, towards the end of the century, East Asia. The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century (Hurst, 2024) presents for the first time the Russian perspective on this 'game', drawing on the archives of the Tsars' Imperial Ministry. Both world powers became convinced of the expansionist aims of the other, and considered these to be at their own expense. When one was successful, the other upped the ante, and so it went on. London and St Petersburg were at war only once, during the Crimean War. But Russophobia and Anglophobia became ingrained on each side, as these two great empires hovered on the brink of hostilities for nearly 100 years. Not until Britain and Russia recognized that they had more to fear from Wilhelmine Germany did they largely set aside their rivalries in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which also had major repercussions for the balance of power in Europe. Before that came a century of competition, diplomacy and tension, lucidly charted in this comprehensive new history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the 1970s, the Mexican government acted to alleviate rural unemployment by supporting the migration of able-bodied men. Millions crossed into the United States to find work that would help them survive as well as sustain their families in Mexico. They took low-level positions that few Americans wanted and sent money back to communities that depended on their support. But as U.S. authorities pursued more aggressive anti-immigrant measures, migrants found themselves caught between the economic interests of competing governments. The fruits of their labor were needed in both places, and yet neither country made them feel welcome. Ana Raquel Minian explores this unique chapter in the history of Mexican migration. Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018) draws on private letters, songs, and oral testimony to recreate the experience of circular migration, which reshaped communities in the United States and Mexico. While migrants could earn for themselves and their families in the U.S., they needed to return to Mexico to reconnect with their homes periodically. Despite crossing the border many times, they managed to belong to communities on both sides of it. Ironically, the U.S. immigration crackdown of the mid-1980s disrupted these flows, forcing many migrants to remain north of the border permanently for fear of not being able to return to work. For them, the United States became known as the jaula de oro—the cage of gold. Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages (Reaktion, 2024) by Sara J. Charles takes the reader on an immersive journey through mediaeval manuscript production in the Latin Christian world. Each chapter opens with a lively vignette by a mediaeval narrator – including a parchment-maker, scribe and illuminator – introducing various aspects of manuscript production. Charles poses the question ‘What actually is a scriptorium?’, and explores the development of the mediaeval scriptorium from its early Christian beginnings through to its eventual decline and the growth of the printing press. With the written word at the very heart of the Christian monastic movement, we see the immense amount of labour, planning and networks needed to produce each individual manuscript. By tapping into these processes and procedures, we can experience mediaeval life through the lens of a manuscript maker. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

When the draft majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health was leaked, the media, public officials, and scholars focused on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They noted Justice Alito’s strident tone and radical use of originalism to eliminate constitutional protection for reproductive rights. My guest today has written a book that asks us to also notice over 140 footnotes in the majority opinion and dissent. Are these notes part of the law? In his new book, The Supreme Court Footnote: A Surprising History (NYU Press, 2024), Dr. Peter Charles Hoffer insists that these notes are significant. The footnotes reveal the justices' beliefs about the Constitution's essence, highlight their controversial reasoning, and expose “vastly different interpretations of the role of Supreme Court Justice.” Using a comprehensive qualitative analysis, The Supreme Court Footnote, offers a history of the evolution of footnotes in US Supreme Court opinions and a thoughtful set of case studies to reveal the particular ways that the footnote has affected Supreme Court decisions. Hoffer argues that justices alter the course of history through their decisions and the footnote is the way in which they push their own understanding of the Constitution. Eight case studies show how the footnote has evolved over time. He begins with Chisholm v. Georgia in 1792 and ends with Dobbs v. Jackson case in 2022. Using Dred Scott, Viterbo v. Friedlander, Muller v. Oregon, United States v. Carolene Products, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and District of Columbia v. Heller, Hoffer demonstrates how the footnotes reflect the changing role of the Supreme Court justice and the manner in which they interpret the Constitution. Dr. Hoffer looks back in order to look forward. He offers a study of the footnote that is relevant to contemporary debates over the Supreme Court, methods of interpretation, and politics.  Dr. Peter Charles Hoffer is Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia. Hoffer went to University of Rochester and Harvard and has taught at Ohio State, Notre Dame, and UGA (since 1978). He has written books on the Supreme Court, the Federal Court System, infanticide, impeachment, abortion, early American history, slave rebellions, and historical methods. During the podcast, we mentioned: Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard, 1999) My NBN conversation with Laura F. Edward’s on her book (The People and their Peace), originalism and domestic violence The University of Kansas’s Landmark Law Series Peter’s book Reading Law Forward: The Making of a Democratic Jurisprudence from John Marshall to Stephen G. Breyer (University of Kansas, 2023) The June 2024 recording of Justices Roberts and Alito on godliness Susan’s “Sensitive Places?: How Gender Unmasks the Myth of Originalism in District of Columbia v. Heller” (Polity, 2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Benjamin Waterhouse, full-as-full-can- be Professor of History at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about his book, One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion that Conquered America (Norton, 2024). The book examines how the ideal of self-employment became so prominent in the United States after the 1970s, and how the idea has had damaging consequences for many groups, who often are attracted to working for themselves not because it is so great but because they have so few other good options. Vinsel and Waterhouse also roast entrepreneurship, small businesses, and other golden calves. They end by discussing a new collaborative project, a forthcoming podcast on the political, cultural, and economic history of the United States in the 1990s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

For the first half of the twentieth century, no American industry boasted a more motley and prolific trade press than the movie business—a cutthroat landscape that set the stage for battle by ink. In 1930, Martin Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, conspired with Hollywood studios to eliminate all competing trade papers, yet this attempt and each one thereafter collapsed. Exploring the communities of exhibitors and creative workers that constituted key subscribers, Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Eric Hoyt tells the story of how a heterogeneous trade press triumphed by appealing to the foundational aspects of industry culture—taste, vanity, partisanship, and exclusivity. In captivating detail, Eric Hoyt chronicles the histories of well-known trade papers (Variety, Motion Picture Herald) alongside important yet forgotten publications (Film Spectator, Film Mercury, and Camera!), and challenges the canon of film periodicals, offering new interpretative frameworks for understanding print journalism’s relationship with the motion picture industry and its continued impact on creative industries today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 (Oxford University Press, 2023) argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays—plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars—in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, Dr. Marissa Nicosia shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Throughout the 20th century, especially during and immediately after WWII, New York Jews changed their names at rates considerably higher than any other ethnic group. Representative of the insidious nature of American anti-Semitism, recognizably Jewish names were often barriers for entry into college, employment, and professional advancement. College and job application forms were intentionally used as a means to “control” the Jewish population in a given college or institution. As such, many Jewish families legally changed their names in an effort to thwart pervasive anti-Semitism and discrimination. In A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (New York University Press, 2018), Kirsten Fermaglich nuances the misconceptions and common assumptions made about name-changers and engages in a rich and meticulously researched study examining this trend. Kirsten Fermaglich is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Michigan State University. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

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 Russian Civil War era (1918-1920). These periods saw mass mobilizations of the population take place not just in Russia and the early Bolshevik state, but in many other nations, too. In order to place Stalinism in this more comparative context, Hoffmann draws on a variety of primary archival sources. The Stalinist Era also provides a broad synthesis of recent work on Stalinism, and so interested readers will be able to follow his bibliography to much of the key historical work on the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. Following its treatment of the Russian Civil War, The Stalinist Era takes readers through the NEP (New Economic Policy) period, the “building socialism” era of crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, the Purges of the late 1930’s, the Second World War, and the final postwar Stalin years. Finally, Hoffmann suggests, there are important ways in which Stalinism did not die with Stalin himself. The Stalinist Era combines an effective synthesis of the entire Stalin period, while at the same time, putting forth a specific and engaging argument that Stalinism mirrors many broader trends in modern nations. Historical writing should encourage comparative thinking, and Hoffmann’s book does exactly that. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Tens of thousands of Italian civilians perished in the Allied bombing raids of World War II. More of them died after the Armistice of September 1943 than before, when the air attacks were intended to induce Italy’s surrender. Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945 (Routledge, 2023) addresses this seeming paradox, by examining the views of Allied political and military leaders, Allied air crews, and Italians on the ground. It tells the stories of a little-known diplomat (Myron Charles Taylor), military strategist (Solly Zuckerman), resistance fighter (Aldo Quaranta), and peace activist (Vera Brittain) – architects and opponents of the bombing strategies. It describes the fate of ordinary civilians, drawing on a wealth of local and digital archival sources, memoir accounts, novels, and films, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro. The book will be of interest to readers concerned about the ethical, legal, and human dimensions of bombing and its effects on civilians, to students of military strategy and Italian history, and to World War II buffs. They will benefit from a people-focused history that draws on a range of eclectic and rarely used sources in English and Italian. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The significance of religion for the development of modern racist antisemitism is a much debated topic in the study of Jewish-Christian relations. Cordelia Heß's The Medieval Archive of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden (de Gruyter, 2021), the first study on antisemitism in nineteenth-century Sweden, provides new insights into the debate from the specific case of a country in which religious homogeneity was the considered ideal long into the modern era. Between 1800 and 1900, approximately 150 books and pamphlets were printed in Sweden on the subject of Judaism and Jews. About one third comprised of translations mostly from German, but to a lesser extent also from French and English. Two thirds were Swedish originals, covering all genres and topics, but with a majority on religious topics: conversion, supersessionism, and accusations of deicide and bloodlust. The latter stem from the vastly popular medieval legends of Ahasverus, Pilate, and Judas which were printed in only slightly adapted forms and accompanied by medieval texts connecting these apocryphal figures to contemporary Jews, ascribing them a physical, essential, and biological coherence and continuity - a specific Jewish temporality shaped in medieval passion piety, which remained functional and intelligible in the modern period. Relying on medieval models and their combination of religious and racist imagery, nineteenth-century debates were informed by a comprehensive and mostly negative "knowledge" about Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

One of the most well-told episodes of the First World War, the 1915 Gallipoli expedition, also has its own long-ignored aspects - specifically, the story of how the Allied force successfully evacuated in the middle of winter under the guns of the Turkish defenders. Our guest for this episode of New Books in Military History is an expert on the Gallipoli campaign, retired chief oral historian of the Imperial War Museum in London, U.K., Peter Hart. In a rollicking and engaging interview with host Bobby WIntermute, Peter discusses his most recent book, The Gallipoli Evacuation (Living History, 2020), the oral historian's craft, and the overall conditions faced by British, ANZAC, French, and Turkish troops in the waning months of the campaign.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

With the passing of those who witnessed National Socialism and the Holocaust, the archive matters as never before. However, the material that remains for the work of remembering and commemorating this period of history is determined by both the bureaucratic excesses of the Nazi regime and the attempt to eradicate its victims without trace. Dora Osborne's book What Remains: The Post-Holocaust Archive in German Memory Culture (Camden House, 2020) argues that memory culture in the Berlin Republic is marked by an archival turn that reflects this shift from embodied to externalized, material memory and responds to the particular status of the archive "after Auschwitz." What remains in this late phase of memory culture is the post-Holocaust archive, which at once ensures and haunts the future of Holocaust memory. Drawing on the thinking of Freud, Derrida, and Georges Didi-Huberman, this book traces the political, ethical, and aesthetic implications of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture across different media and genres. In its discussion of recent memorials, documentary film and theater, as well as prose narratives, all of which engage with the material legacy of the Nazi past, it argues that the performance of “archive work” is not only crucial to contemporary memory work but also fundamentally challenges it. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In the fourth and final episode of this series, he talks to William Silber – author of Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence (Bloomsbury, 2012). A giant (literally) of 20th-century policymaking, Volcker chaired the Fed from 1979 to 1987, implementing monetarist shock therapy, driving up the fed funds rate from 11% to 20% to crush inflation expectations, and pulling inflation down from nearly 15% in early 1980 to below 3% three years later. “For Volcker, the most important denigrating fact of inflation was … that it undermines trust in government,” says Silber. “When we give the government the right to print money … we trust that the government will not debase the currency … When you think about inflation in that context, there is no number – two, four, six. Any number is bad. The only number that works is zero .. If you asked Volcker – and I asked him – what's the right number, he said zero”. From 1990 until his retirement in 2019, Bill Silber was professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University. His award-winning book is built on more than 100 hours of interviews with Volcker. The author of seven other books, Silber’s latest – The Power of Nothing to Lose: The Hail Mary Effect in Politics, War, and Business – will be published in paperback in September 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Losing a pet has always been a unique kind of pain. No set rituals exist to help provide closure when pets die, there are no readily shared passages from spiritual texts, no community of compassion to surround the mourner and help alleviate grief. And there is a sense of taboo, that it is somehow socially incorrect to mourn an animal as one would a person and feel the pain so intensely. Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves, and Eternal Devotion (Thames & Hudson, 2024) by Dr. Paul Koudounaris confronts this taboo by telling the stories of people who have memorialised their beloved animals. The book addresses the moral and spiritual prejudices that have historically surrounded animals, and reveals how, in the face of these prejudices, a movement started in the nineteenth century to treat pets with dignity even in death. It is a fight that is still far from over, but the triumphs that are revealed as the book unfolds, found in burial grounds small to grand and on monuments humble to huge, possess the power to touch everyone who has ever cared for an animal companion. In tracing the historical evolution of pet cemeteries through the stories of the people and pets that have been integral to their development, this book reveals both similarities in the way we mourn animal companions and a stunning cultural diversity. From humble Cherry in London to pets of the rich and powerful, this is a history filled with inspiration, wild eccentricity, and eternal love. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

After the unprecedented Exxon Valdez oil spill, a jury of ordinary Alaskans decided that Exxon had to be punished. However, Exxon fought back against their punishment. They did so, in-part, by supporting research that suggested jurors are irrational. This work came from an esteemed group of psychologists, behavioural economists, and legal theorists–including Daniel Kahneman, and Cass Sunstein. In this three-part series in partnership with Canada’s National Observer, Cited Podcast investigates the forgotten legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the research that followed. This first part, an Alaskan Nightmare, covers the spill and its immediate effects. Subsequent episodes will run weekly. Subscribe today to ensure you do not miss part #2, 12 Angry Alaskans, and part #3, Damaging Rationality. This is episode five of Cited Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

After two government bailouts of the American economy in less than twenty years, free market thought is due for serious reappraisal. Free Market: The History of an Idea (Basic Books, 2022) shows how the idea became so powerful, why it succeeded, and why it has failed so spectacularly. In 1990, the G7 Countries enjoyed 70 percent of world GDP. In the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was supposed to be a story of the success of free markets. However, in the past thirty years, that number has dropped by half, and Asia has emerged as a major motor of world economic growth. Today, state-run China is the second biggest economy on earth, and tiny Singapore, with its state-owned companies, has become a new model of wealth creation. In other words, Milton Friedman's free market dogma, that only private companies can create wealth and that states hamper it, has not proved very clearly to be untrue.  This book shows how we got to the current crisis of free market thought, and suggests how we can find our way out. Contrary to popular free market narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But in the eighteenth century, some free-market thinkers began insisting only pure free markets, without state intervention, could work. A tradition of free-market ideological brittleness emerged, and it has led orthodox free market economics to some spectacular failures. It is a paradox that an economic theory rooted in the idea of competition, adaptation and evolution, has refused to follow its own precepts. This book shows that we need to go back to the origins of free market thought in order to understand its dynamism, as well as its inherent weaknesses, and to develop new economic concepts to face the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century. Jacob Soll is an American university professor and professor of philosophy, history and accounting at the University of Southern California. Soll's work examines the mechanics of politics, statecraft and economics by dissecting the various elements of how modern states and political systems succeed and fail. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Islamic art is often misrepresented as an iconophobic tradition. As a result of this assumption, the polyvalence of figural artworks made for South Asian Muslim audiences has remained hidden in plain view. Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500-1800 (Brill, 2023) situates manuscript illustrations and album paintings within cultures of devotion and ritual shaped by Islamic intellectual and religious histories. Central to this story are the Mughal siblings, Jahanara Begum and Dara Shikoh, and their Sufi guide Mulla Shah. Through detailed art historical analysis supported by new translations, this study contextualizes artworks made for Indo-Muslim patrons by putting them into direct dialogue with written testimonies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Pittsburgh, the elevation varies wildly, fluctuating 660 feet from highest to lowest points throughout the area and making it one of the hilliest cities in the United States. Throughout this unruly and physically challenging landscape, the city's first mass transportation system was built - a steadily expanding network of public stairways, locally referred to as "city steps," these flights of stairs are a throwback to a very different time in history and a very different Pittsburgh.  In City Steps of Pittsburgh: A History & Guide (History Press, 2024), authors Laura Zurowski, Charles Succop and Matthew Jacob present the history of the Steel City steps and a walking guide to their scenic locations today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960-2022 (Oxford University Press, 2023) provides a more comprehensive and meaningful periodization of the commercialization of documentary film. Although the commercial ascension of documentary films might seem meteoric, it is the culmination of decades-long efforts that have developed and fortified the audience for documentary features. Author Nora Stone refines rough explanations of these efforts through a robust synoptic history of the market for documentary films, using knowledge of film economics and the norms of industry discourse to tell a richer story. This periodization will allow scholars to compare the commercialization of documentary film with other genres. Drawing on archival documents, industry trade journals and popular press, and interviews with filmmakers and film distributors, Stone illuminates how documentary features have become more plentiful, popular, and profitable than ever before. Ailin Zhou is a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Chinese cinema, Asian diasporic visual culture, contemporary art, and feminist and queer theories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this third episode, he talks to Wyatt Wells – author of Economist in an Uncertain World – Arthur F. Burns and The Federal Reserve, 1970–1978 (Columbia University Press, 1994). Burns has had a bad press - so bad that Chris Hughes, one of Facebook's founders, was moved to rehabilitate him. Leading the Fed from 1970 to 1978 when inflation averaged 9%, Burns was an accomplished business-cycle economist but also a politically partisan Chair intensely loyal to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Going far beyond his remit as a central banker, Burns oversaw government efforts to control prices and wages as an alternative to monetary policy. “If you couple an incomes policy with a tight fiscal and monetary policy, it can work. The problem is that it often becomes an excuse for not doing that,” says Wells. “Burns found himself trapped in this position where he felt he couldn't raise interest rates without wrecking the controls programme and possibly his own career – his own position at the Fed. It's clear in ‘73, he knows interest rates need to go up. They're trying to raise them but he's got these political concessions and he's doing this sort of dance, trying to square the circle … And of course: ‘I'm the smartest guy in the room. Therefore, I should play a key role in this effort to balance everything’. I think there are very few Federal Reserve chairmen who have elbowed their way into other areas in the way that Burns did. Maybe none”. An economic historian, Wyatt Wells has been Professor of History at Auburn University, Montgomery, since 1997. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Katharine Sykes joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Symbolic Representation in Early Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2024). In the early Middle Ages, the conversion of the early English kingdoms acted as a catalyst for significant social and cultural change. One of the most visible of these changes was the introduction of a new type of household: the monastic household. These reproduced through education and training, rather than biological means; their inhabitants practised celibacy as a lifelong state, rather than as a stage in the life course. Because monastic households depended on secular households to produce the next generation of recruits, previous studies have tended to view them as more mutable than their secular counterparts, which are implicitly regarded as natural and ahistorical.  Katharine Sykes charts some of the significant changes to the structure of households between the seventh to eleventh centuries, as ideas of spiritual, non-biological reproduction first fostered in monastic households were adopted in royal households in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as ideas about kinship that were generated in secular households, such as the relationship between genealogy and inheritance, were picked up and applied by their monastic counterparts. In place of binary divisions between secular and monastic, biological and spiritual, real and imagined, Sykes demonstrates that different forms of kinship and reproduction in this period were intimately linked. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Baseball’s introduction to the Philippines. The slot machine trade between Manila and Shanghai. A musical based extremely loosely on the life of the sultan of Sulu. These are just a few of the historical topics from Lio Mangubat’s Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period (Faction Press: 2024), a collection of 13 essays on stories from Filipino history as a Spanish and then American colony. All the stories come from Lio’s podcast, The Colonial Department, which features long-lost stories from the country's past under Spanish, British, American, and Japanese rule. In this interview, Lio and I talk about what inspired his essay collection, his conversation with Albert Samaha (an earlier podcast guest!) and what’s missing in how we talk about the Philippines Lio is also the editor in chief of publishing house Summit Books, and is based in Manila. Find him on Instagram at @liomangubat and @thecolonialdept. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second episode, he interviews Robert Bremner – author of Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin Jr. and the Creation of the Modern American Financial System (Yale University Press, 2004). Bill Martin still holds the record for the longest chairmanship at the Fed – holding the office from 1951 to 1970. A Democrat, he was first nominated by President Harry Truman and reappointed (more or less willingly) by Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He dismantled government wartime controls over interest rates, battled to save the postwar currency-management regime, democratised the Fed, and fought successive presidents to keep its independence. These conflicts started early, says Bremner. “Martin told this story about walking down Wall Street and passing the president going the other way and Martin said: ‘Good morning, Mr. President, great to see you’. And Truman looked at him and said: ‘Traitor’. Basically Truman wanted to continue low interest rates certainly until he left office and for as long as possible”. After a career in finance at the World Bank and in the mutual-fund industry, Bob Bremner is now a director of the Westminster Ingleside Foundation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In A History of the Hasmonean State: Josephus and Beyond (T&T Clark, 2019), Kenneth Atkinson tells the exciting story of the nine decades of the Hasmonean rule of Judea (152 - 63 BCE) by going beyond the accounts of the Hasmoneans in Josephus in order to bring together new evidence to reconstruct how the Hasmonean family transformed their kingdom into a state that lasted until the arrival of the Romans. Atkinson reconstructs the relationships between the Hasmonean state and the rulers of the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic Empires, the Itureans, the Nabateans, the Parthians, the Armenians, the Cappadocians, and the Roman Republic. He draws on a variety of previously unused sources, including papyrological documentation, inscriptions, archaeological evidence, numismatics, Dead Sea Scrolls, pseudepigrapha, and textual sources from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine periods. Atkinson also explores how Josephus's political and social situation in Flavian Rome affected his accounts of the Hasmoneans and why any study of the Hasmonean state must go beyond Josephus to gain a full appreciation of this unique historical period that shaped Second Temple Judaism, and created the conditions for the rise of the Herodian dynasty and the emergence of Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport—they organised colonial spaces and structured the political, economic, and social relations of empire, both within African colonies and between colonies and the European metropole. European officials in French, Italian, British, German, Belgian, and Portuguese territories in Africa shared a common challenge—the transport problem. While they imagined that roads would radiate commerce and political hegemony by collapsing space, the pressures of constructing and maintaining roads rendered colonial administration thin, ineffective, and capricious. Automotive empire emerged as the European solution to the transport problem, but revealed weakness as much as it extended power. As Automotive Empire reveals, motor vehicles and roads seemed the ideal solution to the colonial transport problem. They were cheaper and quicker to construct than railroads, overcame the environmental limitations of rivers, and did not depend on the recruitment and supervision of African porters. At this pivotal moment of African colonialism, when European powers transitioned from claiming territories to administering and exploiting them, automotive empire defined colonial states and societies, along with the brutal and capricious nature of European colonialism itself. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Eyal Regev's The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred (Yale UP, 2019) is he first scholarly work to trace the Temple throughout the entire New Testament, this study examines Jewish and Christian attitudes toward the Temple in the first century and provides both Jews and Christians with a better understanding of their respective faiths and how they grow out of this ancient institution. The centrality of the Temple in New Testament writing reveals the authors’ negotiations with the institutional and symbolic center of Judaism as they worked to form their own religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this first episode, he interviews Mark Nelson - author of Jumping the Abyss: Marriner S. Eccles and the New Deal, 1933-1940 (University of Utah Press, 2017). Eccles chaired the Fed from 1934 to 1948, turned it into a Washington power centre, and centralised policymaking with the Board of Governors. The US might have been better served if Eccles and his nemesis Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury Secretary from 1934-1945, had swapped roles, says Nelson. "That's true except for the fact that Eccles did do something very important at the Fed and that is the Banking Act of 1935, which really changed the Fed in an enormously important way and Morgenthau would not have done that ... I think it would have happened at some point. You could make the argument, though, that it may not have happened in 1935 if Eccles hadn't been there because Eccles took the job at the Fed on the understanding that these changes would be made”. An actor-turned-historian, Mark Nelson was educated at Pepperdine University and Claremont Graduate University and today teaches at Greenville Technical College, South Carolina. His next book will be Race and Recovery: James F. Byrnes and the New Deal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Ayn Rand is a provocative and polarizing figure. Strongly pro-capitalist and anti-communist, Rand was a dogmatic preacher of her moral philosophy. Based on what she called "rational self-interest", Rand believed in prosperity-seeking individualism above all.  Alexandra Popoff's deeply researched biography traces Rand's journey from her early life as a privileged secular Jew in pre-revolution St. Petersburg, through the deprivations of life in Crimea during the Russian Civil War, and across the world to a new life in the United States in the 1920s. These early experiences influenced Rand's views, which she expressed in her sharp critique of Soviet Russia in her first major novel, We The Living. In Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success (Yale UP, 2024) We follow Rand's extraordinary career in early Hollywood as an apprentice scriptwriter with Cecil DeMille and her evolution into an accomplished novelist of tightly plotted, intellectual stories. Her strong promotion of laissez-fair capitalism and creative, high achieving "supermen" willing to risk everything to achieve their goals came through in her two best selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.  Following her literary career Rand focused on her philosophical theory of Objectivism and became a cult-like figure to many of her devoted followers.  Video: Mike Wallace interview with Ayn Rand from 1959.  Recommended reading: Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, set in 1911 and 1899, are the most-played American history video games since The Oregon Trail. Beloved by millions, they’ve been widely acclaimed for their realism and attention to detail. But how do they fare as re-creations of history? In Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past (St Martin's Press, 2024), award-winning American history professor Dr. Tore Olsson takes up that question and more. Weaving the games’ plots and characters into an exploration of American violence between 1870 and 1920, Dr. Olsson shows that it was more often disputes over capitalism and race, not just poker games and bank robberies, that fueled the bloodshed of these turbulent years. As such, this era has much to teach us today. From the West to the Deep South to Appalachia, Olsson reveals the gritty and brutal world that inspired the games, but sometimes lacks context and complexity on the digital screen. Colourful, fast-paced, and dramatic, Red Dead’s History sheds light on dark corners of the American past for gamers and history buffs alike. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton UP, 2024) sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era. In this beautifully written book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks how inhabitants of the Roman Empire—especially women and girls—understood their bodies and constructed communities of care to mitigate and make sense of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on medical texts, legal documents, poetry, amulets, funerary art, and more, she shows how these communities were deeply human yet never just human. Freidin demonstrates how patients and caregivers took their place alongside divine and material agencies to guard against the risks inherent to childbearing. She vividly illustrates how these efforts and vital networks offer a new window onto Romans’ anxieties about order, hierarchy, and the individual’s place in the empire and cosmos. Unearthing a risky world that is both familiar and not our own, Birthing Romans reveals how mistakes, misfortunes, and interventions in childbearing were seen to have far-reaching consequences, reverberating across generations and altering the course of people’s lives, their family histories, and even the fate of an empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Who were the German scientists who worked on atomic bombs during World War II for Hitler's regime? How did they justify themselves afterwards?  Examining the global influence of the German uranium project and postwar reactions to the scientists involved, Mark Walker explores the narratives surrounding 'Hitler's bomb'. The global impacts of this project were cataclysmic. Credible reports of German developments spurred the American Manhattan Project, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in turn the Soviet efforts. After the war these scientists' work was overshadowed by the twin shocks of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.  Hitler's Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima (Cambridge UP, 2024) sheds light on the postwar criticism and subsequent rehabilitation of the German scientists, including the controversial legend of Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's visit to occupied Copenhagen in 1941. This scientifically accurate but non-technical history examines the impact of German efforts to harness nuclear fission, and the surrounding debates and legends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In his compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge UP, 2020), Gregory Daddis explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men. The result was the crafting and dissemination of a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish GIs' expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam. By examining the role that popular culture can play in normalizing wartime sexual violence and challenging readers to consider how American society should move beyond pulp conceptions of 'normal' male behavior, Daddis convincingly argues that how we construct popular tales of masculinity matters in both peace and war. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Anne Gray Fischer speaks about her path to and through research, including how sex workers informed her analysis of policing and state violence, the role of law enforcement in struggles over economic development, and the intellectual and practical factors of research design. Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal system. In The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (UNC Press, 2022)--a searing history of women and police in the modern United States--Anne Gray Fischer narrates how sexual policing fueled a dramatic expansion of police power. The enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and their right to move freely through city streets. Throughout the twentieth century, police departments achieved a stunning consolidation of urban authority through the strategic discretionary enforcement of morals laws, including disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and other prostitution-related misdemeanors. Between Prohibition in the 1920s and the rise of broken windows policing in the 1980s, police targeted white and Black women in distinct but interconnected ways. These tactics reveal the centrality of racist and sexist myths to the justification and deployment of state power. Sexual policing did not just enhance police power. It also transformed cities from segregated sites of urban vice into the gentrified sites of Black displacement and banishment we live in today. By illuminating both the racial dimension of sexual liberalism and the gender dimension of policing in Black neighborhoods, The Streets Belong to Us illustrates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of urban police regimes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Historically, the insurance industry in America has been fragmented. As a result, there have been debates and conflicts over the proper roles of federal and state governments, business, and the responsibilities of individuals. Who should cover the risks of loss? And to what extent should risk be shared and by whom? In Uncovered: The Story of Insurance in America (Oxford UP, 2023), Katherine Hempstead answers these questions by exploring the history of the insurance business and its regulation in the United States from the 1870s through the twentieth century. Specifically, she focuses on the friction between the public demand for insurance and the private imperatives of insurers. Tracing the history of the industry from the early days of life, fire, and casualty insurance to the development of state regulation in the late nineteenth century, Hempstead examines the role that insurers initially played in the largely voluntary social safety net and how this changed over time. After the Great Depression, the federal government assumed a greater role in the provision of insurance, while insurers enthusiastically pursued the growing business of employee benefits. As the twentieth century progressed, insurers and government have become interdependent, with insurers participating in publicly funded markets. As Hempstead shows, periodic crises in life, fire, health, auto, and liability insurance highlighted gaps between the coverage that insurers were willing to provide and what the public demanded. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A global account of histories of war, from Antiquity to the present day, Histories of War (Pen & Sword Military, 2024) shows how the varied modes of representation record political, cultural and social developments as well as military events. Covers all forms of discussion and commemoration from statuary to scholarship, films to novels. Important not only to those interested in the history of war but also to those concerned with culture and history in general. This erudite volume on the theory and practice of military history will interest a wide readership including both professional historians of war and those concerned with its broader philosophical dimension. The author - a well established authority in European history - has provided an informed, rigorous analysis of a difficult topic. It will delight those who seek enlightenment of the historian's craft, military or otherwise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Beginning in late 1940, over three thousand Jewish girls and young women were forced from their family homes in Sosnowiec, Poland, and its surrounding towns to worksites in Germany. Believing that they were helping their families to survive, these young people were thrust into a world where they labored at textile work for twelve hours a day, lived in barracks with little food, and received only periodic news of events back home. By late 1943, their barracks had been transformed into concentration camps, where they were held until liberation in 1945. Using a fresh approach to testimony collections, Janine P. Holc reconstructs the forced labor experiences of young Jewish females, as told by the women who survived and shared their testimony. Incorporating new source material, the book carefully constructs survivors’ stories while also taking a theoretical approach, one alert to socially constructed, intersectional systems of exploitation and harm. The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust (Brandeis UP, 2023) elucidates the limits and possibilities of social relations inside camps and the challenges of moral and emotional repair in the face of indescribable loss during the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Returning to the New Books Network is Doug Greene, here to discuss his book The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky (Routledge, 2024). Split into three main parts, the book first surveys Kautsky’s own life and thought, starting with his early interest in socialist politics and turn towards Marxism, followed by a slow but steady turn away from revolution and towards reform, believing parliamentary procedures were the best road to social transformation. The second part looks at the works of Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, all of whom offer critical responses to Kautsky’s reformism, and the reassertion of the importance of revolutionary thought to any Marxist project. The third and final part looks at the contemporary works of Lars Lih, Eric Blanc and Mike Macnair and their attempts to make Kautsky’s reformist practice the central pillar of the contemporary left. Throughout, Greene argues that the real lesson Kautsky offers is the dead-end of reformism to any revolutionary project. Some other relevant readings on this topic include Doug Greene | Why Kautsky Was Wrong (and Why You Should Care) Doug Greene | Why Kautsky Was Wrong (LeftVoice interview) Harrison Fluss | The Prophet Avec Lacan Douglas Greene is a historian in Boston. He is also the author of the books A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism and Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union. His writing has appeared in a number of outlets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

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, or they were fellow travelers of the Soviet Union. Peace proposals coming from the Soviet Union were nothing more than propaganda. Activists in Europe, meanwhile, were treated as a kind of curiosity in the broader Cold War, but their role was to highlight the growing tensions between the superpowers. This left an important question unanswered: what exactly was the significance of this peace activism that emerged after 1945? Did it amount to anything? Petra Goedde’s The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 2019) fills in the important history of peace movements during the Cold War. Goedde discusses the different movements that existed in the United States and Europe from 1945 until the early 1970s. She looks at different facets of these peace movements. Much of it is centered on opposition to nuclear weapons, but Goedde’s analysis extends into the realm of decolonization, environmentalism, and gender. She concludes by noting some of the long-term impacts of peace activism, including the formation of the Green Party in Germany and the adoption of certain policies by foreign policy realists such as Richard Nixon. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Cairo's synagogues shed new light on the transformation Egyptian society and its Jewish community underwent from 1875 to the present. Sacred Places Tell Tales: Jewish Life and Heritage in Modern Cairo (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is the previously untold history of Egyptian Jewry and the ways in which Cairo's synagogues historically functioned as active institutions in the social lives of these Jews. Historian Yoram Meital interprets Cairo's synagogues as exquisite storytellers. The synagogues still stand in Cairo, and they shed new light on the social, cultural, and political processes that Egyptian society and the Jews underwent from 1875 to the present. Studying old and new synagogues in the Egyptian capital, their locations, the items they stored, and the range of religious and nonreligious activities they hosted reveals the social heterogeneity and the diverse ways in which modern Jewish sociocultural identity was constructed within Cairo's Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Karaite communities. Meital contends that studying the congregations and the social services provided in synagogues reveals the local Jewish community's customs, cultural preferences, socioeconomic gaps, and class divisions. Sacred Places Tell Tales narrates not only the past but also the unprecedented transformations that have occurred in recent years in Egypt. While only a handful of Jews live in Egypt, the preservation of Jewish heritage, first and foremost synagogues and cemeteries, enjoy a growing interest in public discourse and popular culture. This new desire to preserve Jewish heritage is inseparable from the ongoing public debate about Egyptian society, its characteristics, and its identity, past and present. By contextualizing Jewish heritage preservation in a longer Egyptian and Jewish history, Meital opens a window into one of the most significant political discussions dividing Egyptian society today. If you'd like to see the Ben Ezra Synagogue, you can on YouTube.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865 (U Georgia Press, 2021), Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865. Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America's system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one's status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual's continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system. Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together—by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies—these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property—including that most precious, themselves. For more, see the "Generations of Freedom" website.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Swati Chattopadhyay's book Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023) recasts the history of the British empire by focusing on the small spaces that made the empire possible. It takes as its subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and landscapes and uses them to narrate the untold stories of the marginalized people-the servants, women, children, subalterns, and racialized minorities-who held up the infrastructure of empire. In so doing it opens up an important new approach to architectural history: an invitation to shift our attention from the large to the small scale.  Taking the British empire in India as its primary focus, this book presents eighteen short, readable chapters to explore an array of overlooked places and spaces. From cook rooms and slave quarters to outhouses, go-downs, and medicine cupboards, each chapter reveals how and why these kinds of minor spaces are so important to understanding colonialism. With the focus of history so often on the large scale - global trade networks, vast regions, and architectures of power and domination - Small Spaces shows instead how we need to rethink this aura of magnitude so that our reading is not beholden such imperialist optics. With chapters which can be read separately as individual accounts of objects, spaces, and buildings, and introductions showing how this critical methodology can challenge the methods and theories of urban and architectural history, Small Spaces is a must-read for anyone wishing to decolonize disciplinary practices in the field of architectural, urban, and colonial history. Altogether, it provides a paradigm-breaking account of how to 'unlearn empire', whether in British India or elsewhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Traces of Enayat (Transit Books, 2023) is a work of creative nonfiction tracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature’s tragic heroine. It begins in Cairo, 1963. Four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. For the next three decades, it’s as if Enayat never existed at all. Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat’s long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat.  In this biographical detective story, Mersal retraces Enayat's life and afterlife though interviews with family members and friend, even tracking down the apartments, schools, and sanatoriums where Enayat spent her days. As Mersal maps two simultaneous psychogeographies--from the glamor of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal’s own past--a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms. With Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject. First published in Arabic in 2019, this English edition was translated by Robin Moger and published by Transit Books in 2024. Iman Mersal is the author of five books of poems and a collection of essays, How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts. In English translation, her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and other publications. Her most recent prose work, Traces of Enayat, received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Literature in 2021. She is a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The little-known stories of the people responsible for what we know today as modern medical ethics. In Making Modern Medical Ethics: How African Americans, Anti-Nazis, Bureaucrats, Feminists, Veterans, and Whistleblowing Moralists Created Bioethics (MIT Press, 2024), Robert Baker tells the counter history of the birth of bioethics, bringing to the fore the stories of the dissenters and whistleblowers who challenged the establishment. Drawing on his earlier work on moral revolutions and the history of medical ethics, Robert Baker traces the history of modern medical ethics and its bioethical turn to the moral insurrections incited by the many unsung dissenters and whistleblowers: African American civil rights leaders, Jewish Americans harboring Holocaust memories, feminists, women, and Anglo-American physicians and healthcare professionals who were veterans of the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. The standard narrative for bioethics typically emphasizes the morally disruptive medical technologies of the latter part of the twentieth century, such as the dialysis machine, the electroencephalograph, and the ventilator, as they created the need to reconsider traditional notions of medical ethics.  Baker, however, tells a fresh narrative, one that has historically been neglected (e.g., the story of the medical veterans who founded an international medical organization to rescue medicine and biomedical research from the scandal of Nazi medicine), and also reveals the penalties that moral change agents paid (e.g., the stubborn bureaucrat who was demoted for her insistence on requiring and enforcing research subjects’ informed consent). Analyzing major statements of modern medical ethics from the 1946–1947 Nuremberg Doctors Trials and Nuremberg Code to A Patient’s Bill of Rights, Making Modern Medical Ethics is a winning history of just how respect and autonomy for patients and research subjects came to be codified. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that’s exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022). The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC’s reports offered the best estimates of the butcher’s bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community’s assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC’s work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mitchel P. Roth and Dr. Mahmut Cengiz unfolds the gripping history of weaponized mail, offering the first ever comprehensive exploration of this sinister phenomenon. Spanning two centuries, the book unveils the history of postal bombs, describing the evolution of both explosives and the postal services that facilitated their deadly use. From an eighteenth-century incident involving Jonathan Swift to modern acts of terror by groups like the IRA and the suffragettes and lone wolves such as the Unabomber, it uncovers the surprising ubiquity of mail bombs. This chronological account meticulously covers each decade, from early anarchists and world wars through the Cold War to the rise of the serial bomber. Astounding in scope, this book sheds light on the psychopathy, motivations and political implications behind murder by mail. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

For Kahane, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the black nationalist, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the Arabs. The greatest enemy of the Jews was liberalism. Shaul Magid, Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue, is a celebrated and brilliant scholar of radical and dissident Judaism in America. He joins John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard to discuss his book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2024) on Jewish Defense League Founder and the surprising American origins of Jewish radicalism not of the left but of the right. The conversation starts with Magid recounting a call from celebrated leftist radical Arthur Waskow to make the case that all American Jewish radicalism is of the left. Magid sees it differently: Although the radically right Meir Kahane went on to fame and influence in Israel, both through his party Kach (meaning Thus!) and through successor parties that heightened ultra-nationalism, he loved baseball, and grew up thinking about how to strengthen Jewish identity within a late 1960's America defined by "race wars and culture wars of 1967/68. " Long before his semi-successsful transplantation to Israel, he was the founder of the Jewish Defense League, which absorbed black nationalism (he even wrote a piece called "The Jewish Panthers") and tried to flip it into a model for mobilized Jewish ethnic sectarianism. John asks Shaul about Kahane's claim not to hate Arabs but to love Jews--Shaul believes he actually hated both. Kahane's misunderstanding of the Israeli Black Panthers (a group of Jewish radicals from Middle Eastern and North African origins, inspired by the American Black Panther revolutionary movement) is symptomatic of his failure to grasp the complexity of political currents in Israel. Golda Meir was able to adapt to Israeli political currents when she emigrated from America; Kahane not so much. Nonetheless, by the late 1970's a home-grown neo-Kahanism waxes in Israel, with a majoritarian arrogance unlike Kahane's perennially minoritarian view. He may not have fully broken through to the mainstream, but when he was assassinated in 1990 his funeral (at the time when his party Kach was still banned, when a solution to Jewish-Arab coexistence still seemed within reach) was still the largest any Israeli had ever had. Does liberalism, and liberal Zionism in the 1990s succeed? Magid says it had its moment in the 1990s--it tepidly opposed settlers, endorsed Oslo. But the reality of the 2020's has no space for that liberal two-statism. What we have now, which is distinct from Kahane's older (right) radicalism is outright Jewish conservatism, driven by the potent impact of Orthodoxy. About October 7, Kahane would have said "I told you so." Kahane’s recurrent refrain was that, no matter what naïve liberals might hope, Palestinian nationalism would not be bartered away for the goods of electricity or a washing machine. And yet Magid sees this current moment as an unexpected boon in some ways for the Jewish radical left. The journal Jewish Currents and Jewish Voices for Peace have found a new argument for turning away from liberal Zionism to a new form of unapologetic diasporism. Listen to and Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Jane-Marie Collins's book Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood: Bahia, Brazil, 1830-1888 (Liverpool UP, 2023) examines three major currents in the historiography of Brazilian slavery: manumission, miscegenation, and creolisation. It revisits themes central to the history of slavery and race relations in Brazil, updates the research about them, and revises interpretations of the role of gender and reproduction within them. First, about the preponderance of women and children in manumission; second, about the association of black female mobility with intimate inter-racial relations; third, about the racialised and gendered routes to freed status; and fourth, about the legacies of West African female socio-economic behaviours for modalities of family and freedom in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. The central concern within the book is how African and African descendant women navigated enslaved motherhood and negotiated the divide between enslavement and freedom for themselves and their children. The book is, therefore, organised around the subject position of the enslaved mother and the reproduction of her children in enslavement, while the condition of enslaved motherhood is examined through overlapping historical praxis evidenced in nineteenth-century Bahia: contested freedom, racialised mothering, and competing maternal interests - biological, ritual, surrogate. The point at which these interests converged historically was, it is argued, a conflict over black female reproductive rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

How do public markets, as ordinary as they seem, carry the weight of a city’s history? How do such everyday buildings reflect a city’s changing political, social, and economic needs, through their yearslong transformations in forms, functions, and management? Today’s book is: Everyday Architecture in Context: Public Markets in Hong Kong, 1842-1981 (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2023), by Dr. Carmen C. M. Tsui. Integrating architecture and history, the book invites readers to go through the growth and governance of colonial Hong Kong by tracing the past and present of public markets as a study of extensive first-hand historical materials. Readers witness the changes in Hong Kong markets from hawker pitches to classical market halls to clean modernist municipal complexes. This book offers a new perspective of understanding the familiar everyday markets with historical contexts possibly unfamiliar to most, studying markets as a microcosm of the city and a capsule of its history. Our guest is: Dr. Carmen C. M. Tsui, who is an architect and urban historian. She is an associate professor in the Department of History at Lingnan University, HKSAR. She obtained her Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, with a specialization in the history of architecture and urbanism. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell. Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The spice islands: Specks of land in the Indonesian archipelago that were the exclusive home of cloves, commodities once worth their weight in gold. The Portuguese got there first, persuading the Spanish to fund expeditions trying to go the other direction, sailing westward across the Atlantic. Roger Crowley, in his new book Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (Yale University Press: 2024) covers six decades of exploration, conflict and conquest, starting from the Portuguese capture of Malacca in 1511 to the Spanish founding of Manila and the start of the galleon trade in 1571. Roger Crowley is a narrative historian of the early modern period. He is the author of five celebrated books, including City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (Faber & Faber: 2011) and Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire (Random House: 2015). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Spice. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the decade after the Second World War, 35,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution and their dependants arrived in Canada. This was a watershed moment in Canadian Jewish history. The unprecedented scale of the relief effort required for the survivors, compounded by their unique social, psychological, and emotional needs challenged both the established Jewish community and resettlement agents alike.  Adara Goldberg's Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955 (U Manitoba Press, 2015) highlights the immigration, resettlement, and integration experience from the perspective of Holocaust survivors and those charged with helping them. The book explores the relationships between the survivors, Jewish social service organizations, and local Jewish communities; it considers how those relationships--strained by disparities in experience, language, culture, and worldview--both facilitated and impeded the ability of survivors to adapt to a new country. Researched in basement archives and as well as at Holocaust survivors' kitchen tables, Holocaust Survivors in Canada represents the first comprehensive analysis of the resettlement, integration, and acculturation experience of survivors in early postwar Canada. Goldberg reveals the challenges in responding to, and recovering from, genocide--not through the lens of lawmakers, but from the perspective of "new Canadians" themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this episode, host SEAC Director John Sidel talks with Dr Qingfei Yin, SEAC Associate and Assistant Professor of International History at LSE. Dr Qingfei Yin talks about her new book State Building in Cold War Asia Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border (due out with Cambridge University Press in August 2024), explains how she became interested in her research on China and Vietnam relations and the borderlands between the two countries, and discusses other projects she has begun working on beyond her forthcoming book. Dr Qingfei Yin is Assistant Professor of International History (China and the World) at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, her research focuses on China’s relations with its Asian neighbours, Asian borderlands, and the Cold War in Asia. She is particularly interested in how the global Cold War interacted with state-building in marginal societies. Her book State Building in Cold War Asia: Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border will be published by Cambridge University Press in August 2024. Subsequent projects focus on how capitalist Southeast Asian countries shaped China during the latter’s early reform era in the 1980s and the historical memory of the Sino-Vietnamese Cold War partnership in the two countries. Dr Yin is an alumna of the LSE-Peking University Double MSc in International Affairs Programme. She studied International Politics and History at Peking University for her undergraduate degree and completed her PhD in History at George Washington University. Before returning to LSE, she was Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Military Institute. She also serves as the Book Review Editor of Journal of Military History and on the Editorial Board of Cold War History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR--and still provides a model of opposition in Putin's Russia. Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world's imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile--and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton UP, 2024) is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century. Benjamin Nathans's vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents--from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was "simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people." An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR's totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin's Russia--and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024) is a fascinating study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. This book takes as its core subject matter six court cases from Qing China that involve people who moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth. Focusing on this movement, Matthew H. Sommer looks at the transgender paradigms and literary tropes through which gender-transing was understood, ultimately revealing how acts of gender-crossing and gender boundaries were perceived. This book is an effortless blend of social, legal, and cultural history, and it is filled with captivating legal cases involving forgery and impersonation, fox-spirit mediums, midwives, and those living on the margins of late imperial China. This is definitely a must-read for those interested in Chinese history and gender history, as well as any scholars who need inspiration for what can be done with interesting sources that don't quite fit in existing projects.  To find out more about Matthew Sommer’s work, head to his website, or you can listen to his previous appearance on the New Books Network here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

How is Yosemite National Park a microcosm for our warming, fire-driven, world?  Arizona State University emeritus professor Stephen Pyne answers that question in Pyrocene Park: A Journey Into the Fire History of Yosemite National Park (U Arizona Press, 2023). Pyne frames the fire history of Yosemite National Park around a three day hike he and a team of researchers took into the park's backcountry as part of a program examining the effects of changing fire regimes over the last several decades.  In the process, Pyne explains how and why the human abolition - and reignition - of fires in the park have had dramatic effects on a place which is 95% wilderness. People, Pyne argues, have a strange relationship with fire, at once keeping the elemental process at arm's length while simultaneously being intertwined culturally and even physically with fire and its effects. As fires grow and the planet warms, Pyne asks readers to consider Yosemite as both a warning about the dangers of misunderstanding fire, and an example of how to respect fire as the ecological necessity it has always been. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the waning days and immediate aftermath of World War II, Nazi diplomats and spies based in Spain decided to stay rather than return to a defeated Germany. The decidedly pro-German dictatorship of General Francisco Franco gave them refuge and welcomed other officials and agents from the Third Reich who had escaped and made their way to Iberia. Amid fears of a revival of the Third Reich, Allied intelligence and diplomatic officers developed a repatriation program across Europe to return these individuals to Germany, where occupation authorities could further investigate them. Yet due to Spain's longstanding ideological alliance with Hitler, German infiltration of the Spanish economy and society was extensive, and the Allies could count on minimal Spanish cooperation in this effort. In Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain (LSU Press, 2014), David Messenger deftly traces the development and execution of the Allied repatriation scheme, providing an analysis of Allied, Spanish, and German expatriate responses. Messenger shows that by April 1946, British and American embassy staff in Madrid had compiled a census of the roughly 10,000 Germans then residing in Spain and had drawn up three lists of 1,677 men and women targeted for repatriation to occupied Germany. While the Spanish government did round up and turn over some Germans to the Allies, many of them were intentionally overlooked in the process. By mid-1947, Franco's regime had forced only 265 people to leave Spain; most Germans managed to evade repatriation by moving from Spain to Argentina or by solidifying their ties to the Franco regime and Span-ish life. By 1948, the program was effectively over. Drawing on records in American, British, and Spanish archives, this first book-length study in English of the repatriation program tells the story of this dramatic chapter in the history of post--World War II Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with the land, waters, forests and wildlife. Where Men No More May Reap or Sow: The Little Ice Age: Scotland 1400–1850 (Birlinn, 2024) by Dr. Richard D. Oram spans 450 years that saw profound transformation in Scotland’s environment. It begins in the fifteenth century, when the ‘Golden Age’ of the early 1200s was but a fading folk memory in a land gripped by the gathering grimness of a ‘little ice age’. Colder, wetter, stormier weather became the new normal, interspersed with brief episodes of warmer but still moist conditions, all of which brought huge challenges to a society on the knife-edge of subsistence. Viewing the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries against the cycles of disease and dearth that were ever-present into the later 1700s, the book explores the slow adoption and application of the ideas of ‘Improvement’ and the radical disruption of Scotland’s environment that ensued. Reformation, revolution and rebellion were the background noise to efforts to subsist and succeed through a hostile age, in which Scotland’s environment was an adversary to be tamed, mastered and made ‘polite’. As the last, bitter decades of the ‘little ice age’ were ground out in foreign wars, forced clearances and potato famines, Scotland prepared itself to embrace the Industrial Age. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Our current culture seems to be increasingly divided on countless issues, including those affecting the church. But for centuries, theological disagreements, political differences, and issues relating to church leadership have made it challenging for Christians to foster unity and love for one another. In When Christians Disagree: Lessons from the Fractured Relationship of John Owen and Richard Baxter (Crossway, 2024), author Tim Cooper explores this polarization through the lives of two oppositional figures in church history: John Owen and Richard Baxter. Cooper highlights their individual stories while showing how their contrasting life experiences, personalities, and temperaments led to their inability to work together. After exploring these lessons from the past, readers will gain insights into their own relationships, ultimately learning how to love and live in harmony with their fellow believers despite their disagreements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today I talked to Ewa Bacon about her book Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Prisoners’ Hospital in Buna-Monowitz (Purdue UP, 2017). In a 1941 Nazi roundup of educated Poles, Stefan Budziaszek--newly graduated from medical school in Krakow--was incarcerated in the Krakow Montelupich Prison and transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in February 1942. German big businesses brutally exploited the cheap labor of prisoners in the camp, and workers were dying. In 1943, Stefan, now a functionary prisoner, was put in charge of the on-site prisoner hospital, which at the time was more like an infirmary staffed by well-connected but untrained prisoners. Stefan transformed this facility from just two barracks into a working hospital and outpatient facility that employed more than 40 prisoner doctors and served a population of 10,000 slave laborers. Stefan and his staff developed the hospital by commandeering medication, surgical equipment, and even building materials, often from the so-called Canada warehouse filled with the effects of Holocaust victims. But where does seeking the cooperation of the Nazi concentration camp staff become collusion with Nazi genocide? How did physicians deal with debilitated patients who faced "selection" for transfer to the gas chambers? Auschwitz was a cauldron of competing agendas. Unexpectedly, ideological rivalry among prisoners themselves manifested itself as well. Prominent Holocaust witnesses Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi both sought treatment at this prisoner hospital. They, other patients, and hospital staff bear witness to the agency of prisoner doctors in an environment better known for death than survival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Kate McDonald, Associate Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, about her fascinating research on the history of mobility in Asia and how it looks different when we approach it as a history of work and labor. The pair traverse McDonald’s career from her current project, The Rickshaw and the Railroad: Human-Powered Transport in the Age of the Machine, to her first book, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (U California Press, 2017) to digital humanities projects she has helped lead. Along the way, they talk about the craft of historical research and what we can learn by revisiting classic texts with mobility and the work of transportation in mind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The U.S. government's decades-long "war on drugs" is increasingly recognized as a moral travesty as well as a policy failure. The criminalization of substances such as marijuana and magic mushrooms offends core tenets of liberalism, from the right to self-rule to protection of privacy to freedom of religion. It contributes to mass incarceration and racial subordination. And it costs billions of dollars per year—all without advancing public health. Yet, in hundreds upon hundreds of cases, courts have allowed the war to proceed virtually unchecked. How could a set of policies so draconian, destructive, and discriminatory escape constitutional curtailment? In The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford UP, 2024), David Pozen provides an authoritative, critical constitutional history of the drug war, casting new light on both drug prohibition and U.S. constitutional development. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, advocates argued that criminal drug bans violate the Constitution's guarantees of due process, equal protection, federalism, free speech, free exercise of religion, and humane punishment. Many scholars and jurists agreed. Pozen demonstrates the plausibility of a constitutional path not taken, one that would have led to a more compassionate approach to drug control. Rather than restrain the drug war, the Constitution helped to legitimate and entrench it. Pozen shows how a profoundly illiberal and paternalistic policy regime was assimilated into, and came to shape, an ostensibly liberal and pluralistic constitutional order. Placing the U.S. jurisprudence in comparative context, The Constitution of the War on Drugs offers a comprehensive review of drug-rights decisions along with a roadmap to constitutional reform options available today. This book is available open access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the final year of the Second World War, as bitter defensive fighting moved to German soil, a wave of intra-ethnic violence engulfed the country.  In Violence in Defeat: The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944–1945 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Bastiaan Willems offers the first study into the impact and behaviour of the Wehrmacht on its own territory, focusing on the German units fighting in East Prussia and its capital Königsberg. He shows that the Wehrmacht's retreat into Germany, after three years of brutal fighting on the Eastern Front, contributed significantly to the spike of violence which occurred throughout the country immediately prior to defeat. Soldiers arriving with an ingrained barbarised mindset, developed on the Eastern Front, shaped the immediate environment of the area of operations, and of Nazi Germany as a whole. Willems establishes how the norms of the Wehrmacht as a retreating army impacted behavioural patterns on the home front, arguing that its presence increased the propensity to carry out violence in Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous - as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the South's most brutal prisons, while his immense talent twice won him pardons.  But, as Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies (Cambridge UP, 2024) shows, these stories were shaped by the white folklorists who 'discovered' Lead Belly and, along with reporters, recording executives, and radio and film producers, introduced him to audiences beyond the South. Through a revelatory examination of arrest, trial, and prison records; sharecropping reports; oral histories; newspaper articles; and more, author Sheila Curran Bernard replaces myth with fact, offering a stunning indictment of systemic racism in the Jim Crow era of the United States and the power of narrative to erase and distort the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The earliest Jewish Sunday schools were female-led, growing from one school in Philadelphia established by Rebecca Gratz in 1838 to an entire system that educated vast numbers of Jewish youth across the country. These schools were modeled on Christian approaches to religious education and aimed to protect Jewish children from Protestant missionaries. But debates soon swirled around the so-called sorry state of “feminized” American Jewish supplemental learning, and the schools were taken over by men within one generation of their creation. It is commonly assumed that the critiques were accurate and that the early Jewish Sunday school was too feminized, saccharine, and dependent on Christian paradigms. Tracing the development of these schools from their inception through the first decade of the twentieth century, Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU Press, 2023), Laura Yares shows this was not the reality. Jewish Sunday Schools argues that the work of the women who shepherded Jewish education in the early Jewish Sunday school had ramifications far outside the classroom. Indeed, we cannot understand the nineteenth-century American Jewish experience, and how American Judaism sought to sustain itself in an overwhelmingly Protestant context, without looking closely at the development of these precursors to Hebrew School. Yares provides an in-depth portrait of a massively understudied movement that acted as a vital means by which American Jews explored and reconciled their religious and national identities. Interviewee: Laura Yares is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City's most populous borough through their search for social justice. Before it was a borough, Brooklyn was our nation's third largest city. Its free Black community attracted people from all walks of life--businesswomen, church leaders, laborers, and writers--who sought to grow their city in a radical anti-slavery vision. The residents of neighborhoods like DUMBO, Fort Greene, and Williamsburg organized and agitated for social justice. They did so even as their own freedom was threatened by systemic and structural racism, risking their safety for the sake of their city. Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough (NYU Press, 2024) recovers the lives of these remarkable citizens and considers their lasting impact on New York City's most populous borough. This cultural and social history is told through four ordinary families from Brooklyn's nineteenth-century free Black community: the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters. The book illustrates the depth and scope of their activism, cementing Brooklyn's place in the history of social justice movements. Their lives offer valuable lessons on freedom, democracy, and family--both the ones we're born with and the ones we choose. Their powerful stories continue to resonate today, as borough residents fill the streets in search of a more just city. This is a story of land, home, labor, of New Yorkers past, and the legacy they left us. This is the story of Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Russia's forceful re-entry into the Middle Eastern arena, and the accentuated continuity of Soviet policy and methods of the 1960s and '70s, highlight the topicality of this groundbreaking study, which confirms the USSR's role in shaping Middle Eastern and global history. The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR's Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford UP, 2017) covers the peak of the USSR's direct military involvement in the Egyptian-Israeli conflict. The head-on clash between US-armed Israeli forces and some 20,000 Soviet servicemen with state-of-the-art weaponry turned the Middle East into the hottest front of the Cold War. The Soviets' success in this war of attrition paved the way for their planning and support of Egypt's cross-canal offensive in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Ginor and Remez challenge a series of long-accepted notions as to the scope, timeline and character of the Soviet intervention and overturn the conventional view that détente with the US induced Moscow to restrainthat a US-Moscow détente led to a curtailment of Egyptian ambitions to recapture of the land it lost to Israel in 1967. Between this analytical rethink and the introduction of an entirely new genre of sources-- -memoirs and other publications by Soviet veterans themselves---The Soviet-Israeli War paves the way for scholars to revisit this pivotal moment in world history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) offers a new interpretation of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippine islands. Drawing on the rich archives of Spain’s Asian empire, Dr. Kristie Patricia Flannery reveals that Spanish colonial officials and Catholic missionaries forged alliances with Indigenous Filipinos and Chinese migrant settlers in the Southeast Asian archipelago to wage war against waves of pirates, including massive Chinese pirate fleets, Muslim pirates from the Sulu Zone, and even the British fleet that attacked at the height of the Seven Years’ War. Anti-piracy alliances made Spanish colonial rule resilient to both external shocks and internal revolts that shook the colony to its core. This revisionist study complicates the assumption that empire was imposed on Filipinos with brute force alone. Rather, anti-piracy also shaped the politics of belonging in the colonial Philippines. Real and imagined pirate threats especially influenced the fate and fortunes of Chinese migrants in the islands. They triggered genocidal massacres of the Chinese at some junctures, and at others facilitated Chinese integration into the Catholic nation as loyal vassals. Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World demonstrates that piracy is key to explaining the surprising longevity of Spain’s Asian empire, which, unlike Spanish colonial rule in the Americas, survived the Age of Revolutions and endured almost to the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it offers important new insight into piracy’s impact on the trajectory of globalisation and European imperial expansion in maritime Asia. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

For twentieth-century Jewish immigrants and their children attempting to gain full access to American society, performative masculinity was a tool of acculturation. However, as scholar Miriam Eve Mora demonstrates, this performance is consistently challenged by American mainstream society that holds Jewish men outside of the American ideal of masculinity. Depicted as weak, effeminate, cowardly, gentle, bookish, or conflict-averse, Jewish men have been ascribed these qualities by outside forces, but some have also intentionally subscribed themselves to masculinities at odds with the American mainstream.  Carrying a Big Schtick: Jewish Acculturation and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century (Wayne State UP, 2024) dissects notions of Jewish masculinity and its perception and practice in America in the twentieth century through the lenses of immigration and cultural history. Tracing Jewish masculinity through major themes and events including both World Wars, the Holocaust, American Zionism, Israeli statehood, and the Six-Day War, this work establishes that the struggle of this process can shed light on the changing dynamics in religious, social, and economic American Jewish life. Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

F*ck The Army! How Soldiers and Civilians Staged the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War (NYU Press, 2024) offers a comprehensive history of the FTA, an antiwar variety show featuring Jane Fonda that played to tens of thousands of active-duty troops over nine months in 1971. From its conception, the civilian-led show was directed towards making visible the growing antiwar movement organized GIs, inspired by but also acting as a rebuttal to the USO tours presented by Bob Hope. Through an analysis of the FTA’s tactical performances of solidarity and resistance, Lindsay Goss brings into view the theatrical dimensions of the GI movement itself, revealing it as representative of the revolutionary and theatrical politics of the period. Dr. Lindsay Goss is a theater historian, artist, and lecturer in English and Theater Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her work explores how popular discourses of authenticity and identity rely upon historical anxieties about the actor in proximity to politics, and how these anxieties shape the fields of theater history, activism, and contemporary performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a global phenomenon. By the early twenty-first century, people in nearly every corner of the world have undergone the initiations that authorize them to channel a cosmic energy—known as Reiki—to heal body, mind, and spirit. They lay hands on themselves and others, use secret symbols and incantations to send Reiki to distant recipients, and strive to follow five precepts to cultivate their spiritual growth. Reiki’s international rise and development is due to the work of Hawayo Takata (1900–1980), a Hawai‘i-born Japanese American woman who brought Reiki out of Japan and adapted it for thousands of students in Hawai‘i and North America, shaping interconnections across the North Pacific region as well as cultural transformations over the transwar period spanning World War II. Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific (U Hawaii Press, 2023) analyzes how, from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s to her death in Iowa in 1980, Takata built a vast trans-Pacific network that connected Japanese American laborers on Hawai‘i plantations to social elites in Tokyo, Hollywood, and New York; middle-class housewives in American suburbs; and off-the-grid tree planters in the mountains of British Columbia. Using recently uncovered archival materials and original oral histories, this book examines how these relationships between healer and patient, master and disciple, became deeply infused with values of their time and place and how they interplayed with Reiki’s circulation, performance, and meanings along with broader cultural shifts in the twentieth-century North Pacific. Highly readable and informative, each chapter is structured around a period in the life of Takata, the charismatic, rags-to-riches architect of the network in which Reiki spread for decades.  Alternate Currents explores Reiki as an exemplary transnational spiritual therapy, demonstrating how lived practices transcend artificial distinctions between religion and medicine, and circulate in global systems while maintaining strong connections with the practices’ homeland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

During Hawai‘i’s territorial period (1900–1959), Native Hawaiians resisted assimilation by refusing to replace Native culture, identity, and history with those of the United States. By actively participating in U.S. public schools, Hawaiians resisted the suppression of their language and culture, subjection to a foreign curriculum, and denial of their cultural heritage and history, which was critical for Hawai‘i’s political evolution within the manifest destiny of the United States. In Forward without Fear: Native Hawaiians and American Education in Territorial Hawai'i, 1900-1941 (U Nebraska Press, 2024), Derek Taira reveals that many Native Hawaiians in the first forty years of the territorial period neither subscribed nor succumbed to public schools’ aggressive efforts to assimilate and Americanize them but instead engaged with American education to envision and support an alternate future, one in which they could exclude themselves from settler society to maintain their cultural distinctiveness and protect their Indigenous identity. Taira thus places great emphasis on how they would have understood their actions—as flexible and productive steps for securing their cultural sovereignty and safeguarding their future as Native Hawaiians—and reshapes historical understanding of this era as one solely focused on settler colonial domination, oppression, and elimination to a more balanced and optimistic narrative that identifies and highlights Indigenous endurance, resistance, and hopefulness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left (Akashic Books, 2024) explores how that pivotal slice of time tastes to a bright, obsessive-compulsive boy who is shipped off to a hothouse academic boarding school as he reaches the age of thirteen--just as Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited starts to bite, and the Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band explodes. When he arrives in January 1966, Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for the comforts of home and his family's loving au pair, Teresa. By December 1967, he's mutated into a 6'2? tall rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really high and fly to Nashville. In between--as the hippie revolution blossoms in the world outside--Hitchcock adjusts to the hierarchical, homoerotic world of Winchester, threading a path through teachers with arrested development, some oafish peers, and a sullen old maid--a very English freak show. On the way he befriends a cadre of bat-winged teenage prodigies and meets their local guru, the young Brian Eno. At the end of 1967, all the ingredients are in place that will make Robyn Hitchcock a songwriter for life. But then again, does 1967 ever really end? Robyn Hitchcock is a rock 'n' roll surrealist. Born in London in 1953, he describes his songs as "pictures you can listen to." Hitchcock has floated at a tangent to the mainstream for nearly five decades, and his songs have been performed by R.E.M., the Replacements, Neko Case, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Lou Barlow, Grant-Lee Phillips, Sparklehorse, and Suzanne Vega with the Grateful Dead, among others. Hitchcock lives in London with his wife Emma Swift and two cats, Ringo and Tubby. Robyn on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America: Music, Satire, & the Battle Against the Christian Right (LSU Press, Spring 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025). Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From the inception of cinema to today’s franchise era, remaking has always been a motor of ongoing film production. Hollywood Remaking: How Film Remakes, Sequels, and Franchises Shape Industry and Culture (U California Press, 2024) challenges the categorical dismissal in film criticism of remakes, sequels, and franchises by probing what these formats really do when they revisit familiar stories.  Kathleen Loock argues that movies from Hollywood’s large-scale system of remaking use serial repetition and variation to constantly negotiate past and present, explore stability and change, and actively shape how the film industry, cinema, and audiences imagine themselves. Far from a simple profit-making exercise, remaking is an inherently dynamic practice situated between the film industry’s economic logic and the cultural imagination. Although remaking developed as a business practice in the United States, this book shows that it also shapes cinematic aesthetics and cultural debates, fosters film-historical knowledge, and promotes feelings of generational belonging among audiences. For more on the Hollywood Memories project, go here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire (U Hawaii Press, 2023) interrogates the intersections between cultural production, identity, and persuasive messaging that idealized inclusion and unity across Japan’s East Asian empire (1895–1945). Japanese propagandists drew on a pan-Asian rhetoric that sought to persuade colonial subjects to identify with the empire while simultaneously maintaining the distinctions that subjugated them and marking their attempts to self-identify as Japanese as inauthentic, illegitimate forms of “passing” or “posing.” Visions of inclusion encouraged assimilation but also threatened to disrupt the very logic of imperialism itself: If there was no immutable difference between Taiwanese and Japanese subjects, for example, then what justified the subordination of the former to the latter? The chapters emphasize the plurality and heterogeneity of empire, together with the contradictions and tensions of its ideologies of race, nation, and ethnicity. The paradoxes of passing, posing, and persuasion opened up unique opportunities for colonial contestation and negotiation in the arenas of cultural production, including theater, fiction, film, magazines, and other media of entertainment and propaganda consumed by audiences in mainland Japan and its colonies. From Meiji adaptations of Shakespeare and interwar mass media and colonial fiction to wartime propaganda films, competing narratives sought to shape how ambiguous identities were performed and read. All empires necessarily engender multiple kinds of border crossings and transgressions; in the case of Japan, the policing and blurring of boundaries often pivoted on the outer markers of ethno-national identification. This book showcases how actors—in multiple senses of the word—from all parts of the empire were able to move in and out of different performative identities, thus troubling its ontological boundaries. Christina Yi is associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of British Columbia. Her research field is modern and contemporary Japanese literature, with a particular focus on issues of postcoloniality, language politics, genre, and cultural studies. Yi’s first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea, was published by Columbia University Press in 2018. Andre Haag is associate professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His research explores how the insecurities and terrors of colonialism attendant to the annexation of Korea and internalization of the “Korea Problem” were inscribed within the literature, culture, and vocabularies that circulated within the Japanese imperial metropole. Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Dynamic Repetition: History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought (Brandeis UP, 2022) proposes a new understanding of modern Jewish theories of messianism across the disciplines of history, theology, and philosophy. The book explores how ideals of repetition, return, and the cyclical occasioned a new messianic impulse across an important swath of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Jewish thought. To grasp the complexities of Jewish messianism in modernity, the book focuses on diverse notions of “dynamic repetition” in the works of Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Sigmund Freud, and their interrelations with basic trajectories of twentieth-century philosophy and critical thought. Gilad Sharvit is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University. A scholar of modern Jewish thought, Sharvit's interests lie in Jewish philosophy, German-Jewish literature and culture, German and continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and critical theory. He completed his PhD studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Philosophy Department and later accepted a Diller Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Center for Jewish Studies at University of California, Berkeley (2014-16) and was a Townsend Fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at University of California, Berkeley (2016-17). In 2017-18, Professor Sharvit was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Koebner Minerva Center for German History (Hebrew University) and at Tel Aviv University (Minerva Center for German History and School of Philosophy). Professor Sharvit is the author of Therapeutics and Salvation: Freud and Schelling on Freedom (Magnes Press) (in Hebrew) and co-editor and contributing author of the volumes Freud and Monotheism: The Violent Origins of Religion with Karen Feldman (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Canonization and Alterity: Heresy in Jewish History, Thought, and Literature with Willi Goetschel (De Gruyter, 2020). Amir Engel is a professor at the German Department of the Hebrew University and currently also a visiting professor for the history and present of Jewish-Christian relations at the Theological Faculty of the Humboldt University in Berlin. He studied philosophy, literature and cultural studies at the Hebrew University and earned his doctorate in German Studies at Stanford University, California. He then taught and researched at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. His research focuses on religion, politics, literature, and the relationships between these three areas. His main topics include German-Jewish Romanticism and German-Jewish literature and culture in the post-war period. His first book, Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography, was published in 2017, and he is currently finalizing his second book manuscript, tentatively titled The Politics of Spirituality: German, Jews and Christian 1900 - 1942 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women--whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power--were up to something much more interesting than other histories would lead us to believe. Together, these women helped to make antiquity as we know it. In this monumental work, Dunn reconceives our understanding of the ancient world by emphasizing women's roles within it. The Missing Thread: How Women Shaped the Course of Ancient History (Viking, 2024) never relegates women to the sidelines and is populated with well-known names such as Cleopatra and Agrippina, as well as the likes of Achaemenid consort Atossa and Olympias, a force in Macedon. Spanning three thousand years, the story moves from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, from Lesbos to Asia Minor, from the Persian Empire to the royal court of Macedonia, and concludes with Rome and its growing empire. The women of antiquity are undeniably woven throughout the fabric of history, and in The Missing Thread they finally take center stage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Filling a gap in Eastern European fashion studies, this book presents middle-class women consuming fashion in the symbolic 'Little Paris' of interwar Bucharest, and examines how their material and cultural means supported the city's modernisation. Combining archival research with personal archaeology, this interdisciplinary work explores Romania's reinvention as a modern state, focusing on middle-class women as they lived their lives - walking through the streets, at lavish events, at cafes and clubs, shopping, and working.  Analysing largely unseen, unused written and visual texts, The Women of 'Little Paris': Women’s Fashion in Interwar Bucharest (Bloomsbury, 2024) encourages exploration of new avenues for research, uniting scholars of Romanian culture, history and fashion and guiding readers through a forgotten, little explored world and, in so doing, adds to our understanding and knowledge of the global image of interwar fashion cultures and the emerging field of Romanian fashion studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Anxiety may have been abounding in the old Cold War West that progress - whether political or economic - has been reversed, but for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history’s most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale. Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book’s three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores “post-historical” Hunchun’s diverse sociopolitics since high socialism’s demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound “end of history” which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea (Stanford UP, 2024) is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism. Ed Pulford is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on anthropological and historical approaches to Eurasian borderlands, Sino-Russian relations, the past and present of socialism, and comparative experiences of socialism and empire. He has lived and worked in China, Russia, Japan, and Korea. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

It’s the 1930s. Amarendra Chandra Pandey, the youngest son of an Indian prince, is about to board a train when a man bumps into him. Amarendra feels a prick; he then boards the train, worried about what it portends. Just over a week later, Amarendra is dead—of plague. India had not had a case of plague in a dozen years: Was Amarendra’s death natural, or premeditated—perhaps orchestrated by Benoy, his half-brother and competitor for the family riches? The case is the subject of Dan Morrison’s book The Poisoner of Bengal: The 1930s Murder That Shocked the World (Juggernaut, 2024), who investigates how an Indian prince was able to get his hands on the plague, the scandalous murder trial that followed, and Benoy’s surprising post-independence epilogue. Dan Morrison is an editor at USA TODAY's Washington bureau. His reporting from around the globe has appeared in outlets including National Geographic, the New York Times, BBC News and PRX's The World. He is also the author of The Black Nile (Viking: 2010), an account of his voyage from Lake Victoria to Rosetta, through Uganda, Sudan and Egypt. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Poisoner of Bengal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Puppet Masters: How MI6 Masterminded Ireland's Deepest State Crisis (Mercier Press, 2024), David Burke uncovers the clandestine activities of Patrick Crinnion, a Garda intelligence officer who secretly served MI6 during the early years of the Troubles. As the Garda Síochána launched a manhunt for the Chief-of-Staff of the IRA, Crinnion found himself playing a crucial role in the effort to track him down. Before his disappearance, Crinnion’s actions exposed a web of secrets including those of another British spy in the Irish police, damaging intelligence leaks, gunrunning by Irish politicians, and a cover-up related to the murder of a Garda.  Burke reveals MI6’s shady dealings, from attempts to smear Irish politicians to plans for using criminals as assassins and the secret surveillance of a key IRA member. Crinnion fled into exile. The Puppet Masters not only reveals what became of him but also provides an insightful look into a turbulent period marked by covert operations, betrayal, and the power struggle that shaped modern Irish history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Contemporary observers and historians alike have attributed these inequalities to distinct stages of China's political economy: the dualistic economy of semicolonialism, rural-urban divisions in the socialist period, and capital concentration in the reform era. In Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou (Harvard UP, 2024), Mark Baker shows how different states across twentieth-century China shaped these inequalities in similar ways, concentrating resources in urban and core areas at the expense of rural and regional peripheries. Pivot of China examines this dynamic through the city of Zhengzhou, one of the most dramatic success stories of China’s urbanization: a railroad boomtown of the early twentieth century, a key industrial center and provincial capital of Henan Province in the 1950s, and by the 2020s a “National Central City” of almost ten million people. However, due to the spatial politics of resource concentration, Zhengzhou’s twentieth-century growth as a regional city did not kickstart a wider economic takeoff in its hinterland. Instead, unequal spatial politics generated layers of inequality that China is still grappling with in the twenty-first century. Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in History at Purdue University. She is interested in the circulation of people, goods, and ideas and how societies in history and today cope with the challenges wrought by increased travel in aspects of culture, politics, commerce, law, science, and technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Early pollsters thought they had the psychological tools to quantify American mind, thereby enabling a truly democratic polity that would be governed by a rational public opinion. Today, we malign the misinformed public and dismiss the deluge of frivolous polls. How did the rational public become the phantom public? We tell the story of George Gallup, his critics, and also examine alternatives to political polling. This is episode three of Cited Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Ebony Nilsson explores the lives of left-wing Soviet refugees who fled the Cold War to settle in Australia, and uncovers how they adjusted to life under surveillance in the West. As Cold War tensions built in the postwar years, many of these refugees happily resettled in the West as model refugees, proof of capitalist countries' superiority. But for a few, this was not the case. Displaced Comrades provides an account of these Cold War misfits, those refugees who fled East for West, but remained left-wing or pro-Soviet. Drawing on interviews, government records and surveillance dossiers from multiple continents this book explores how these refugees' ideas took root in new ways. As these radical ideas drew suspicion from western intelligence these everyday lives were put under surveillance, shadowed by the persistent threat of espionage. With unprecedented access to intelligence records, Nilsson focuses on how a number of these left-wing refugees adjusted to life in Australia, opening up a previously invisible segment of postwar migration history, and offering a new exploration of life as a Soviet 'enemy alien' in the West. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The war on the Eastern front remains relatively less well explored as compared to the western front of World War II. Yet some of the most titanic battles in modern military history occurred on the steppes of eastern Europe. Stalingrad and Moscow are names known to most but less well-known are the vast battles that occurred in Byelorussia. By June 1944, Stalin and his generals had launched Operation Bagration involving more than two million soldiers marching across fronts hundreds of miles wide. In his latest work, Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War (Oxford UP, 2024), Jonathan Dimbleby chronicles the military, political, and diplomatic events of the final months on arguably the most crucial front of World War 2. Dimbleby draws on previously untranslated accounts from ordinary Russian and German soldiers to chronicle the curtain call of the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Endgame 1944 provides insights into the major German and Russian players balanced off with accounts of the trials of individual soldier.. Dimbleby has enjoyed a long career in television beginning with ITV and BBC where he covered world affairs. He presented ITV's flagship weekly political program This Week for over ten years. He has also worked in radio with BBC 4. His book Destiny in the Desert: The Road to El Alamein was short-listed for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, awarded to the best work of historical non-fiction. He is also Chair of Richard Dimbleby Cancer Fund named after his father. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The nature and reliability of the ancient sources are among the most important issues in the scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is noteworthy, therefore, that scholars have grown increasingly skeptical about the value of these materials for reconstructing the life of the Teacher of Righteousness.  Travis B. Williams' book History and Memory in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Remembering the Teacher of Righteousness (Cambridge UP, 2019) is designed to address this new perspective and its implications for historical inquiry. He offers an important corrective to popular conceptions of history and memory by introducing memory theory as a means of informing historical investigation. Charting a new methodological course in Dead Sea Scrolls research, Williams reveals that properly representing the past requires an explanation of how the mnemonic evidence found in the relevant sources could have developed from a historical progression that began with the Teacher. His book represents the first attempt in Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship to integrate history and memory in a comprehensive way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the 20th century at multiple levels: social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial–often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers. In British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022), Charles Barr considers films and filmmakers, and studios and sponsorship, against the wider view of changing artistic, socio-political, and industrial climates over the decades of the 20th Century. Considering British cinema in the wake of one of the most familiar of cinematic reference points–Alfred Hitchcock–Barr traces how British cinema has developed its own unique path, and has since been celebrated for its innovative approaches and distinctive artistic language. Charles Barr worked for many years at the University of East Anglia, helping to develop one of the first UK programs in film studies at the graduate and undergraduate level. He has since taught in St. Louis, Galway, and Dublin, and is currently a Research Fellow at St. Mary's University, Twickenham. Much of his published work has been on British cinema, including the books Ealing Studios and English Hitchcock, and he was cowriter, with director Stephen Frears, of Typically British, part of the centenary history of cinema broadcast on Channel 4 in 1995. He has continued writing on Hitchcock, with a study of Vertigo in the BFI Classics series and Hitchcock: Lost and Found, coauthored with the Parisian scholar Alain Kerzoncuf. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His writing and other interviews about literature and film can also be found on Pages and Frames. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project aligned with the postwar belief that transforming bodies, minds, aesthetics, and institutions could liberate disabled Americans from economic reliance on the state, and demonstrated the growing belief that performance could provide job opportunities for people with disabilities.  Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation (NYU Press, 2024) offers an original cultural history of disability and performance in modern America, exploring rehabilitation’s competing legacies. The book highlights an unexpected alliance of rehabilitation professionals, deaf teachers, policy makers, disability activists, queer artists, and religious leaders who championed performance’s rehabilitative potential. At the same time, some disabled artists imagined a different political itinerary for theatrical practice. Rather than acquiescing to the terms of productive citizenship, these artists recuperated rehabilitation as a creative resource for imagining and building a world beyond work.  Using previously unexplored archives, Disability Works portrays the history of disabled Americans’ performance labor as both a national aspiration and a national problem. The book reveals how disabled artists and activists ingeniously used rehabilitative resources to fuel their performance practices, breaking free from the grasp of rehabilitation and fostering more just institutions. From state-funded “sign-mime” to Black modern dance, community theatre to Stanislavskian actor training, speculative infrastructures to epistolary performance, Disability Works recovers an expansive repertoire of aesthetic and infrastructural investigations into the terms of how disability works in modern American culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this elegantly written study Rival Wisdoms: Reading Proverbs in the Canterbury Tales (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Nancy Mason Bradbury situates Chaucer’s last and most ambitious work in the context of a zeal for proverbs that was still rising in his day. Rival Wisdoms demonstrates that for Chaucer’s contemporaries, these tiny embedded microgenres could be potent, disruptive, and sometimes even incendiary. In order to understand Chaucer’s use of proverbs and their reception by premodern readers, we must set aside post-Romantic prejudices against such sayings as prosaic and unoriginal. The premodern focus on proverbs conditioned the literary culture that produced the Canterbury Tales and helped shape its audience’s reading practices. Aided by Thomas Speght’s notations in his 1602 edition, Dr. Bradbury shows that Chaucer acknowledges the power of the proverb, reflecting on its capacity for harm as well as for good and on its potential to expand and deepen—but also to regulate and constrict—the meanings of stories. Far from banishing proverbs as incompatible with the highest reaches of poetry, Chaucer places them at the center of the liberating interpretive possibilities the Canterbury Tales extends to its readers. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Throughout the 1920s Mexico was rocked by attempted coups, assassinations, and popular revolts. Yet by the mid-1930s, the country boasted one of the most stable and durable political systems in Latin America. In the first book on party formation conducted at the regional level after the Mexican Revolution, Sarah Osten examines processes of political and social change that eventually gave rise to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which dominated Mexico's politics for the rest of the twentieth century. In analyzing the history of socialist parties in the southeastern states of Campeche, Chiapas, Tabasco, and Yucatán, Osten demonstrates that these 'laboratories of revolution' constituted a highly influential testing ground for new political traditions and institutional structures.  The Mexican Revolution's Wake: The Making of a Political System, 1920–1929 (Cambridge UP, 2018) shows how the southeastern socialists provided a blueprint for a new kind of party that struck calculated balances between the objectives of elite and popular forces, and between centralized authority and local autonomy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In January 1945, the final year of the Pacific War, Japanese-held Hong Kong became the site of coordinated attacks by the U.S. Navy on Japanese warships and aircraft. Target Hong Kong: A True Story of U.S. Navy Pilots at War (Osprey, 2024) by Steven K. Bailey tells the story of what those air raids were like for the men who lived through them. Target Hong Kong is a work of military history that puts the lives of five U.S. Navy pilots and the Prisoner of War Raymond (“Ray”) Eric Jones at the center of the story. By weaving together records from diaries, oral histories, and US Navy documents, Steven has not only detailed which airstrike happened where, but also explored how both those living in the Stanley Military Internment Camp and those flying over the skies of Hong Kong experienced the war. Detailed, intimate, and filled with illuminating reflections on the ins and outs of working with wartime diaries, and the importance of visiting sites of historical battles, Target Hong Kong is sure to be of interest to those looking to learn more about the history of wartime Hong Kong and the experiences of American servicemen in the Pacific War. It will also interest anyone looking for an absorbing book that brings the events of the Pacific War to life. Readers interested in learning more should also check out Steven’s previous book, Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese-Occupied Hong Kong, 1942–1945 (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), as well as “The Battle of Hong Kong: 1941: a Spatial History Project” that Steven references in the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of knowledge across the Roman scholarly landscape, and the embedding of those changes in manuscript witnesses. Letteney explores scholarly productions ranging from juristic writings and legal compendia to theological tractates, military handbooks, historical accounts, miscellanies, grammatical treatises, and the Palestinian Talmud. He demonstrates how imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth far beyond the domain of theology — and how intellectual tools forged in the fires of doctrinal controversy shed their theological baggage and came to undergird the great intellectual productions of the Theodosian Age, and their material expressions. Letteney's volume offers new insights and a new approach to answering the perennial question: What does it mean for Rome to become Christian? The book is open access at Cambridge Core. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review Mark Letteney is an ancient historian and archaeologist working in the history of incarceration, book history, and the archaeology of military occupation. His second book, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (co-authored with Matthew David Larsen) should appear in 2025. Michael Motia teaches in Religious Studies and Classics at UMass Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

By combining chronological coverage, analytical breadth, and interdisciplinary approaches, these two volumes—Histories of Solitude: Colombia, 1820s-1970s (Routledge, 2024) and Histories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s-2010s (Routledge, 2024)—study the histories of Colombia over the last two centuries as illustrations of the histories of democracy across the Americas.  The volumes bring together over 40 scholars based in Colombia, the United States, England, and Canada working in various disciplines to discuss how a country that has been consistently presented as a rarity in Latin America provides critical examples to re-examine major historical problems: republicanism and liberalism; export economies and agrarian modernization; populism and cultural politics of state formation; revolutionary and counterinsurgent Cold War violence; neoliberal reforms and urban development; popular mobilization and counterhegemonic public spheres; political ecologies and environmental struggles; and labors of memory and the challenge of reconciliation. Contributors are sensitive to questions of subjectivity and discourse, observant of ethnographic details and micro-politics, and attuned to macro-perspectives such as transnational and global histories. These volumes offer fresh perspectives on Colombia and will be of great value to those interested in Latin American and Caribbean history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In his new book, We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America (Oxford UP, 2020), Kevin Mattson documents punk rock in the early 1980s through a comprehensive look into the music, zines, films, bands, and punk Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics. He shows how widespread the punk movement was in creating a counterculture that challenged the conservative narrative of 1980s America. Mattson places the punk countercultural movement into the wider context of Reagan’s America and the cultural war that his presidency created. In opposition to Reagan’s panic narratives of nuclear wars, his tax cuts for the rich, and cuts to public education and other social services, punks saw themselves as everything they rejected about the US. Mattson’s extensive archival research into the punk counterculture makes for an informative and captivating read into the larger ways in which punk impacted American cultural identities and challenged 1980s conservativism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

There are some topics that historians know not to touch. They are just too hot (or too cold). The assassination of JFK is one of them. Most scholars would say either: (a) the topic has been done to death so nothing new can be said or (b) it’s been so thoroughly co-opted by nutty theorists that no sane discussion is possible. Thank goodness David Kaiser believes neither of these things, for if he did we would never have his thought-provoking The Road to Dallas. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Harvard UP, 2008). Taking a professional historian’s skills to documents old and new, Kaiser provides what is doubtless the best argument available that the assassination was in fact a conspiracy, though not the one you may know from a certain movie by Oliver Stone. He weighs each piece of evidence and builds his case point by point. Conclusions are never forced but follow naturally from the record. Not everyone will agree with Kaiser’s position, but it must be taken seriously by anyone interested in the topic. Kaiser has thrown down the gauntlet to those who believe Oswald acted alone. Now it is for other historians to take it up. PS: Read David’s blog “History Unfolding.” Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A new book reveals an incredible slice of Cuban-American history that’s been all but forgotten until now. Lisandro Perez‘s Sugar, Cigars and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York (NYU Press, 2018) tells the story of a vibrant Cuban émigré community in 19th-century New York that ranged from wealthy sugar plantation owners investing their fortunes in New York real estate, to working-class Cubans rolling cigars in Lower Manhattan decades before the industry took hold in Tampa. Cubans in New York had their own businesses, newspapers, and clubs, and many were involved in the struggle to liberate Cuba from colonial Spain. Among those New York-based political activists was the great hero and poet Jose Marti, who lived most of his adult life here. In fact, says Perez, a professor at John Jay College of the City University of New York in the department of Latin American and Latino/Latina studies, New York was the most important city in the U.S. for Cubans until 1960, when of course Miami became the destination for Cubans fleeing communism. This interview is part of an occasional series on the history of New York City sponsored by the Gotham Center at CUNY. Beth Harpaz is the editor for the CUNY website SUM, which showcases books and research from the CUNY community.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence education, commerce, music, art, architecture, communications, food, and every other corner of society. Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation (Princeton University Press, 2020), written by the historian of innovation and the RSA’s resident historian Anton Howes, is the fascinating story of this unique institution. Drawing on exclusive access to a wealth of rare papers and artifacts from the Society’s own archives, Howes shows how the Society of Arts has constantly reinvented itself to keep in step with changing times. The Society has served as a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, purchased and restored an entire village, encouraged the planting of more than sixty million trees, and sought technological alternatives to child labour. Arts and Minds reveals how a society of public-spirited individuals tried to make their country a better place, and draws vital lessons from their triumphs and failures for all would-be reformers today. Matthew Jordan is a professor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Has fascism arrived in America?  In Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2023), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward have gathered experts to survey the history of fascism in the United States. Although the US established a staunch anti-fascist reputation by defeating the Axis powers in World War II, the unsettling truth is that fascist ideas have long been present within American society. Since the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, scholars have debated whether Trumpism should be seen as an outgrowth of American conservatism or of a darker – and potentially fascist – tradition. Fascism in America contributes to this debate by examining the activities of interwar right-wing groups like the Silver Shirts, the KKK, and the America First movement, as well as the post-war rise of Black antifascism and white vigilantism, the representation of American Nazis in popular culture, and policy options for combating right-wing extremism. Gavriel David Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor of History at Fairfield University. His areas of academic specialization include the history of Nazi Germany, memory studies, and counterfactual history. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Black women undertook an energetic and unprecedented engagement with internationalism from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. In many cases, their work reflected a complex effort to merge internationalism with issues of women's rights and with feminist concerns. To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (U Illinois Press, 2019) examines these and other issues with a collection of cutting-edge essays on black women's internationalism in this pivotal era and beyond. Analyzing the contours of gender within black internationalism, scholars examine the range and complexity of black women's global engagements. At the same time, they focus on these women's remarkable experiences in shaping internationalist movements and dialogues. The essays explore the travels and migrations of black women; the internationalist writings of women from Paris to Chicago to Spain; black women advocating for internationalism through art and performance; and the involvement of black women in politics, activism, and global freedom struggles. Tiffany Gill is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies & History and Cochran Scholar at the University of Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Persian Gulf has long been a contested space--an object of imperial ambitions, national antagonisms, and migratory dreams. The roots of these contestations lie in the different ways the Gulf has been defined as a region, both by those who live there and those beyond its shore. Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (Stanford UP, 2024) reveals how capitalism, empire-building, geopolitics, and urbanism have each shaped understandings of the region over the last two centuries. Here, the Gulf comes into view as a created space, encompassing dynamic social relations and competing interests.  Arang Keshavarzian writes a new history of the region that places Iran, Iraq, and the Arab Peninsula together within global processes. He connects moments more often treated as ruptures--the discovery of oil, the Iranian Revolution, the rise and decline of British empire, the emergence of American power--and crafts a narrative populated by a diverse range of people--migrants and ruling families, pearl-divers and star architects, striking taxi drivers and dethroned rulers, protectors of British India and stewards of globalized American universities. Tacking across geographic scales, Keshavarzian reveals how the Gulf has been globalized through transnational relations, regionalized as a geopolitical category, and cleaved along national divisions and social inequalities. When understood as a process, not an object, the Persian Gulf reveals much about how regions and the world have been made in modern times. Making Space for the Gulf offers a fresh understanding of this globally consequential place. Arang Keshavarzian is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (2007) and coeditor of Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (2021). Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

You could fill a large library with books about JFK’s assassination. We’ve even touched on the subject here. The topic of the transfer of power from JFK to LBJ, however, has been neglected. I was under the impression that after JFK was pronounced dead, LBJ took an oath and that was that. As Steve Gillon points out in his terrific new The Kennedy Assassination–24 Hours After. Lyndon B. Johnson’s Pivotal First Day as President (Basic, 2009), that was not that. Rather, the transition was marked by confusion, doubt, anger, mistrust, jealousy, intrigue, and drama of every sort. At the center of it all were two parties–the out-sized president-presumptive, LBJ, and the Kennedy Clan, led by RFK. They were not on good terms. LBJ liked and admired JFK, but he resented the pretense and privilege of the Kennedy Clan. He hated RFK. JFK liked and admired LBJ, but his “people” thought Johnson was a buffoon, and they could not imagine him as president. RFK hated LBJ. JFK managed to kept LBJ and the Clan separated. But he was now dead and the battle was therefore joined. Read all about it in this page-turner of a book. By the way, the History Channel has made a documentary based on Steve’s book. You can read about it here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Yanagawa Seigan (1789–1858) and his wife Kōran (1804–79) were two of the great poets of nineteenth-century Japan. They practiced the art of traditional Sinitic poetry—works written in literary Sinitic, or classical Chinese, a language of enduring importance far beyond China’s borders. Together, they led itinerant lives, traveling around Japan teaching poetry and selling calligraphy. Seigan established Edo-period Japan’s largest poetry society and attained nationwide renown as a literary figure, as well as taking part in stealthy political activities in the years before the Meiji Restoration. Kōran was one of the most accomplished female composers of Sinitic poetry in Japanese history. After her husband’s death, she was arrested and imprisoned for six months as part of a crackdown on political reform. Seigan and Kōran’s works at once display mastery of a poetic tradition and depict Japan on the brink of monumental change. The Same Moon Shines on All: The Lives and Selected Poems of Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran (Columbia UP, 2024) explores the world of Seigan and Kōran, pairing an in-depth account of their lives and times with an inviting selection of their poetry. The book features eminent Sinologist Jonathan Chaves’s translations of more than 130 poems by Seigan and more than 50 by Kōran, each annotated and followed by the original Chinese text. An introduction by Matthew Fraleigh, a specialist in Japan’s Sinitic literature, offers insight into the historical and literary context as well as the poems themselves. Approachable and delightful, this book makes the riches of Japanese Sinitic poetry available to a range of readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Donald L. Miller explains in great detail how Grant ultimately succeeded in taking the city and turning the tide of the war in favor of the Union. Miller begins his tale with events in Cairo and leads the reader through all the important events that lead to success at Vicksburg. He also discusses Grant’s background, personal characteristics, and the influential people surrounding General Grant during this crucial time. Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Emeritus Professor of History at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Miller’s work includes books on World War II, the war in the Pacific, America’s air war against Germany, studies of Chicago and Jazz Age Manhattan. Jessica Moloughney is a graduate student in history and library science at Queens College in New York Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The names of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse are often readily recognized among many Americans. Yet the longer, dynamic history of the Lakota - a history from which these three famous figures were created - remains largely untold. In Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (Yale, 2019), historian Pekka Hämäläinen, author of The Comanche Empire, aims to provide a comprehensive history of Lakota migration, expansion, resistance, survival, and resilience. In turn, Hämäläinen tells the story of a people who “were - and are - shapeshifters with a palpable capacity to adapt to changing conditions around them and yet remain Lakotas.” With the Lakota as its primary historical agents, Lakota America recontextualizes the history of North America in terms of Lakota actions, interests, and power. Hämäläinen starts with the history of the Oceti Sakowin in the seventeenth-century western Great Lakes. From there, Hämäläinen follows the Lakota’s western trajectory, first to the Mnisose (Missouri River), and then to the sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills). In both instances of relocation, the Lakota reinvent themselves while retaining their distinct identity and place in the world. Thanks to - rather than in spite of - their adaptive capacities, says Hämäläinen, the Lakota repeatedly exercise their control of their own destiny as well as the arc of North American history more broadly. Lakota America places the Lakota at the center of North American history, tracing its course up to the present day, and illuminating how generations of shapeshifting has ensured the endurance and resilience of Lakota peoples, sovereignty, and history today. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the department of history at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the late fifth century, a girl whose name has been forgotten by history was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she had transformed herself into Empress Dowager Ling, one of the most powerful politicians of her age and one of the first of many Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia. In this book, Stephanie Balkwill documents the Empress Dowager’s rise to power and life on the throne against the broader world of imperial China under the rule of the Northern Wei dynasty, a foreign people from Inner Asia who built their capital deep in the Chinese heartland. Building on largely untapped Buddhist materials, Balkwill shows that the life and rule of the Empress Dowager is a larger story of the reinvention of religious, ethnic, and gender norms in a rapidly changing multicultural society. The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century (U California Press, 2024) recovers the voices of those left out of the mainstream historical record, painting a compelling portrait of medieval Chinese society reinventing itself under the Empress Dowager’s leadership. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Original and deeply researched, The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700-1827 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) provides a new interpretation of Dutch American slavery which challenges many of the traditional assumptions about slavery in New York. With an emphasis on demography and economics, Michael J. Douma shows that slavery in eighteenth-century New York was mostly rural, heavily Dutch, and generally profitable through the cultivation of wheat. Slavery in Dutch New York ultimately died a political death in the nineteenth century, while resistance from enslaved persons, and a gradual turn against slavery in society and in the courts, encouraged its destruction. This important study will reshape the historiography of slavery in the American North. Michael J. Douma is Associate Research Professor and Director, Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna's cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. This observation demands a new chronology of cultural reconstruction that links the Nazi and postwar years, and a new geography that includes the history of refugees from Nazi Vienna. Rather than presenting the Nazi, exile, and postwar periods as discrete chapters of Vienna's history, Tanzer argues that they are part of a continuous spectrum of cultural evolution--the result of which was the creation of a coherent Austrian identity and culture that emerged by the 1950s.  As she shows, antisemitism and philosemitism were not contradictory forces in post-Nazi Austrian culture. They were deeply interconnected aspirations in a city where nostalgia for the past dominated cultural reconstruction efforts and supported seemingly contradictory impulses. Viennese nostalgia at times concealed the perpetuation of antisemitic fantasies of the city without Jews. At the same time, the postwar desire to return to a pre-Nazi past relied upon notions of Austrian culture that Austrian Jews perfected in exile, as well as on the symbolic remigration of a mostly imagined "Jewish" culture now taxed with redeeming Austria in the aftermath of the Holocaust. From this perspective, philosemitism is much more than a simple inversion of antisemitism--instead, Tanzer argues, philosemitism, problematic as it may be, defines Vienna in the era of postwar reconstruction. In this way, Vanishing Vienna uncovers a rarely discussed phenomenon of the aftermath of the Holocaust--a society that consumes, redefines, and bestows symbolic meaning on the victims in their absence. Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at [email protected] and @PFLerner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today's bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment. The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller's study will only grow more relevant as time passes. "An engaging call to arms," (Kirkus Reviews) Stoller illustrates here in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy. Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first full, single-author history of the eastern Roman empire to appear in over a generation. Covering political and military history as well as all the major changes in religion, society, demography, and economy, Anthony Kaldellis's volume is divided into ten chronological sections which begin with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and end with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century. The book incorporates new findings, explains recent interpretive models, and presents well-known historical characters and events in a new light. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Why did José de León Toral kill Álvaro Obregón, leader of the Mexican Revolution? So far, historians have characterized the motivations of the young Catholic militant as the fruit of fanaticism.  Robert Weis's book For Christ and Country: Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers new insights on how diverse sectors experienced the aftermath of the Revolution by exploring the religious, political, and cultural contentions of the 1920s. Far from an isolated fanatic, León Toral represented a generation of Mexicans who believed that the revolution had unleashed ancient barbarism, sinful consumerism, and anticlerical tyranny. Facing attacks against the Catholic essence of Mexican nationalism, they emphasized asceticism, sacrifice, and the redemptive potential of violence. Their reckless enthusiasm to launch assaults was a sign of their devotion. León Toral insisted that 'only God' was his accomplice; in fact, he was cheered by thousands who dreamed of bringing the Kingdom of Christ to beleaguered Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

For over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organised crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, and children were abducted from across the country between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, held hostage by members of the Sardinian banditry, Cosa Nostra, and the ’Ndrangheta. Subjected to harsh captivities and psychological abuse, the victims spent months and even years in isolation while law enforcement and the state struggled to find them. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Alessandra Montalbano examines this Italian criminal phenomenon. Alessandra Montalbano argues that abduction is a key vantage point from which to understand modern Italy: it troubled the law, terrified society, ignited juridical and parliamentary debates, and mobilised citizens. Bringing together archival and media materials with the victims’ accounts and diverse forms of cultural response, the book examines ransom kidnapping through the lenses of historiography, law, literary criticism, trauma studies, phenomenology, and political philosophy. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy traces how and at what price Italians became aware of living in a country that was being blackmailed by criminal organisations that arguably jeopardised the nation even more than terrorism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Part of a formidable publishing industry, cheap yet eye-catching graphic narratives consistently charmed early modern Japanese readers for around two hundred years. These booklets were called kusazōshi (“grass books”). Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi (Brill, 2024) is the first English-language publication of its kind. It enables anyone new to kusazōshi to gain comprehensive knowledge of the field. For the specialist, our edited volume marks a turning point in scholarship, uncovering fresh research avenues. While exploring the powerful effects of the visual-verbal imagination, this collection opens up bold new vistas on the act of reading and advances provocations around comics and manga. Contributors are: Jaqueline Berndt, Joseph Bills, Michael Emmerich, Adam L. Kern, Fumiko Kobayashi, Frederick Feilden, Laura Moretti, Matsubara Noriko, Satō Satoru, Satō Yukiko, Satoko Shimazaki, Takagi Gen, Tanahashi Masahiro, Ellis Tinios, Tsuda Mayumi and, Glynne Walley. Discount code 72435 for 35%. Valid till 31 Dec, 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Surprisingly little is known about Scottish experiences of the Second World War. Scottish Society in the Second World War (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Michelle Moffat addresses this oversight by providing a pioneering account of society and culture in wartime Scotland. While significantly illuminating a pivotal episode in Scottish history, this book also charts the uncertainties that permeated Scottish society at that time: relating to nationhood, to cultural identity, to Scotland’s place within the Union, and towards the country’s future. Using recently discovered archives, this text examines key aspects of wartime life, including work, leisure, morale, and religion. It also explores the underlying tension between conformity and resistance, and the ways that social fissures shaped Scottish responses to war. Further, in taking a national approach to the British home front, it draws out areas of cultural difference between Scotland and established scholarship on other nations and regions of Britain. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Eliza Scidmore (1856-1928) was a journalist, a world traveler, a writer, an amateur photographer, the first female board member of the National Geographic Society — and the one responsible for the idea to plant Japanese cherry trees in Washington DC. Her fascinating life is expertly told by Diana Parsell in Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington's Cherry Trees (Oxford UP, 2023). This is the first biography of Eliza Scidmore, and it draws not only on Scidmore’s surviving letters and photographs but also her some 800 articles and 6 books. By piecing together the chronology of Scidmore’s travels, Parsell has crafted a wonderfully intimate picture of Scidmore’s life, one that documents her trips from the glaciers of Alaska (complete with seal-flipper soup) to the streets of Beijing on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion. Throughout, Scidmore’s tenacity and her joy of discovery really shine through, as do the causes that she advocated for: cross-cultural understanding, environmental conservation, and the beautification of the Potomac. This book is sure to appeal to those interested in travel writing, the history of journalism, and early travelers to East Asia, as well as anyone looking to read a biography about a woman who lived a truly unique life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today’s book is: Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (U Chicago Press, 2024), by Dr. Robin Bernstein, which tells the story of a teenager named William Freeman. Convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s new prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the facility included industrial factories where prisoners worked as “slaves of the state.” They earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, William Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom. Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Dr. Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism. Our guest is: Dr. Robin Bernstein, who is an award-winning cultural historian specializing in race and racism from the nineteenth century to the present. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.  Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell. Playlist for listeners who wish to learn more: Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration Education Behind the Wall Hands Up, Don't Shoot: Researching Racial Injustice The Journal of Higher Education in Prison Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A new kind of city park has emerged in the early twenty-first century. Postindustrial parks transform the derelict remnants of an urban past into distinctive public spaces that meld repurposed infrastructure, wild-looking green space, and landscape architecture. For their proponents, they present an opportunity to turn disused areas into neighborhood anchors, with a host of environmental and community benefits. Yet there are clear economic motives as well—successful parks have helped generate billions of dollars of city tax revenues and real estate development. In Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City (Columbia University Press, 2022) Dr. Kevin Loughran explores the High Line in New York, the Bloomingdale Trail/606 in Chicago, and Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston to offer a critical perspective on the rise of the postindustrial park. He reveals how elites deploy the popularity and seemingly benign nature of parks to achieve their cultural, political, and economic goals. As urban economies have become restructured around finance, real estate, tourism, and cultural consumption, parks serve as civic shields for elite-oriented investment. Tracing changing ideas about cities and nature and underscoring the centrality of race and class, Dr. Loughran argues that postindustrial parks aestheticize past disinvestment while serving as green engines of gentrification. A wide-ranging investigation of the political, cultural, and economic forces shaping park development, Parks for Profit reveals the social inequalities at the heart of today’s new urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this very moving and heartwarming interview I had the opportunity to discuss with Fida Jiyris her work, a beautifully written memoir that tells the story of her and her family journey, which is also the story of Palestine, from the Nakba to the present—a seventy-five-year tale of conflict, exodus, occupation, return and search for belonging, seen through the eyes of one writer and her family. Fida reveals how her father, Sabri, a PLO leader and advisor to Yasser Arafat, chose exile in 1970 because of his work. Her own childhood in Beirut was shaped by regional tensions, the Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Israeli invasion, which led to her mother’s death. Thirteen years later, the family made an unexpected return to Fassouta, their village of origin in the Galilee. But Fida, twenty-two years old and full of love for her country, had no idea what she was getting into. Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel and One Family's Story of Home (Hurst, 2022) chronicles a desperate, at times surreal, search for a homeland between the Galilee, the West Bank and the diaspora, asking difficult questions about what the right of return would mean for the millions of Palestinians waiting to come ‘home’. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Examining the changing character of revolution around the world, The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion (Princeton UP, 2022) focuses on the impact that the concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities exercises on revolutionary processes and outcomes. Once predominantly an urban and armed affair, revolutions in the twentieth century migrated to the countryside, as revolutionaries searched for safety from government repression and discovered the peasantry as a revolutionary force. But at the end of the twentieth century, as urban centers grew, revolution returned to the city―accompanied by a new urban civic repertoire espousing the containment of predatory government and relying on visibility and the power of numbers rather than arms. Using original data on revolutionary episodes since 1900, public opinion surveys, and engaging examples from around the world, Mark Beissinger explores the causes and consequences of the urbanization of revolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beissinger examines the compact nature of urban revolutions, as well as their rampant information problems and heightened uncertainty. He investigates the struggle for control over public space, why revolutionary contention has grown more pacified over time, and how revolutions involving the rapid assembly of hundreds of thousands in central urban spaces lead to diverse, ad hoc coalitions that have difficulty producing substantive change. The Revolutionary City provides a new understanding of how revolutions happen and what they might look like in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Nuria Silleras-Fernandez explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources—literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents—Dr. Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428–1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470–1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479–1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Isabel the Catholic (1451–1504), queen of Castile and a woman lauded in her time as a paragon of reason. Through the lives and experiences of these royal women and the observations, judgments, and machinations of their families, entourages, and circles of writers, chronicles, courtiers, moralists, and physicians in their orbits, Dr. Silleras-Fernandez addresses critical questions about how royal women in Iberia were expected to behave, the affective standards to which they were held, and how perceptions about their emotional states influenced the way they were able to exercise power. More broadly, The Politics of Emotion details how the court cultures in mediaeval and early modern Castile and Portugal contributed to the development of new notions of emotional excess and mental illness. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Welcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. Today, I will be talking to Columbia University professor Ying Qian about her new book, Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia UP, 2023).  The volume enriches our understanding of media’s role in China’s revolutionary history by turning to documentary. Qian guides readers through early documentary practice, left- and right-wing Republican documentary, and documentary as it functioned in the socialist and early postsocialist periods. In reference to socialist documentary, she writes, “As the vanguard of cinema, documentary in the Mao era meant, in principle, to facilitate the dialectical relationship between the masses and the party, not only to aid in their mutual constitution, but also to facilitate a collective formation of knowledge and priorities to direct the unfolding of the revolution” (249). In our interview, we will discover how crucial this understudied genre has been in the 20th century and learn how the mutually constitutive dialectic between documentary form and revolution worked in practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure. For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century. Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of designers―landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners―sought to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty. Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply altering it at the same time?” Eric Grube is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boston College. He also received his PhD from Boston College in the summer of 2022. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing paramilitary organizations across interwar Bavaria and Austria. His publications include: "Making Austria German Again: Austrofascist ‘Home Guards’ against ‘Austrian Legionaries’, 1933-1934," Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 2024 "Borderland Brothers: Austrofascist Competition and Cooperation with National Socialists, 1936–1938," Journal of Austrian Studies, 2023, Winner of Austrian Studies Association’s Max Kade Prize, 2024 "Casualties of War? Refining the Civilian-Military Dichotomy in World War I", Madison Historical Review, 2019 "Racist Limitations on Violence: The Nazi Occupation of Denmark", Essays in History, 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, anarchists were heroes to many working-class immigrants. But to many others, anarchism was a terrifyingly foreign ideology. Determined to crush it, government officials launched a decades-long “war on anarchy,” a brutal program of spying, censorship, and deportation that set the foundations of the modern surveillance state. The lawyers who came to the anarchists’ defense advanced groundbreaking arguments for free speech and due process, inspiring the emergence of the civil liberties movement. Michael Willrich's book American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2023) tells the gripping tale of the anarchists, their allies, and their enemies, showing how their battles over freedom and power still shape our public life. Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

America’s waterways were once the superhighways of travel and communication. Coursing through a central line across the landscape, with tributaries connecting the South to the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River meant wealth, knowledge, and power for those who could master it. In Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi(Harvard University Press, 2019), Jacob Lee offers a new understanding of early America based on the long history of warfare and resistance in the Mississippi River valley. Lee, an Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, traces the Native kinship ties that determined which nations rose and fell in the period before the Illinois became dominant. With a complex network of allies stretching from Lake Superior to Arkansas, the Illinois were at the height of their power in 1673 when the first French explorers—fur trader Louis Jolliet and Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette—made their way down the Mississippi. Over the next century, a succession of European empires claimed parts of the midcontinent, but they all faced the challenge of navigating Native alliances and social structures that had existed for centuries. When American settlers claimed the region in the early nineteenth century, they overturned 150 years of interaction between Indians and Europeans. Masters of the Middle Waters shows that the Mississippi and its tributaries were never simply a backdrop to unfolding events. We cannot understand the trajectory of early America without taking into account the vast heartland and its waterways, which advanced and thwarted the aspirations of Native nations, European imperialists, and American settlers alike. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Stefanie Coché's Psychiatric Institutions and Society: the Practice of Psychiatric Commital in the “Third Reich,” the Democratic Republic of Germany, and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1941-1963 (London: Routledge, 2024; translated by Alex Skinner) probes how the serious and sometimes fatal decision was made to admit individuals to asylums during Germany’s age of extremes. The book shows that - even during the Nazi killing of the sick - relatives played an even more important role in most admissions than doctors and the authorities. In light of admission practices, this study traces how ideas about illness, safety, and normality changed when the Nazi regime collapsed in 1945 and illuminates how closely power configurations in the psychiatric sector were linked to political and social circumstances in the early years of both German successor states. Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at [email protected] and @PFLerner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Since the mid-1700s, poets and scholars have been deeply entangled in the project of reinventing prophecy. Moving between literary and biblical studies, Yosefa Raz's book The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2023) reveals how Romantic poetry is linked to modern biblical scholarship's development. On the one hand, scholars, intellectuals, and artists discovered models of strong prophecy in biblical texts, shoring up aesthetic and nationalist ideals, while on the other, poets drew upon a counter-tradition of destabilizing, indeterminate, weak prophetic power. Yosefa Raz considers British and German Romanticism alongside their margins, incorporating Hebrew literature written at the turn of the twentieth century in the Russia Empire. Ultimately she explains the weakness of modern poet-prophets not only as a crisis of secularism but also, strikingly, as part of the instability of the biblical text itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

San Francisco began its American life as a city largely made up of transient men, arriving from afar to participate in the gold rush and various attendant enterprises. This large population of men on the move made the new and booming city a hub of what "respectable" easterners considered vice: drinking, gambling, and sex work, among other activities.  In City of Vice: Transience and San Francisco's Urban History, 1848-1917 (U Nebraska Press, 2024), historical architect James Mallery describes how and why San Francisco became the titular "city of vice" by tracking the people and activities that local elites would rather have stayed hidden. In doing so, he paints a remarkable picture of a city undertaking remarkable growth and the limits of elite power to control the habits of a large, mobile, urban population. Through famous San Francisco neighborhoods like Chinatown and the Tenderloin, out to the city's "Outside Lands" outskirts, Mallery shows how neighborhoods are defined by more than just the sum of activities outsiders might see as immoral - they're complex places made up of of complex people, and that even the most run down neighborhood has a brilliant history worth telling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

How the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center informed the PLO's relationship to Zionism and Israel In September 1982, the Israeli military invaded West Beirut and Israel-allied Lebanese militiamen massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Meanwhile, Israeli forces also raided the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center and trucked its complete library to Israel. Palestinian activists and supporters protested loudly to international organizations and the Western press, claiming that the assault on the Center proved that the Israelis sought to destroy not merely Palestinian militants but Palestinian culture as well. The protests succeeded: in November 1983, Israel returned the library as part of a prisoner exchange. What was in that library? Much of the expansive collection the PLO amassed consisted of books about Judaism, Zionism, and Israel. In Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy (Princeton UP, 2024), Jonathan Marc Gribetz tells the story of the PLO Research Center from its establishment in 1965 until its ultimate expulsion from Lebanon in 1983. Gribetz explores why the PLO invested in research about the Jews, what its researchers learned about Judaism and Zionism, and how the knowledge they acquired informed the PLO's relationship to Israel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Toby Green draws upon a range of underutilized sources to describe the evolution of West Africa over a period of four transformative centuries. With these sources Green demonstrates that the region was integrated into the developing transcontinental trade networks far earlier than is often portrayed in more Western-centric accounts, and in ways that influenced the development of local communities long before European ships arrived off of their coast. The arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century, however, shifted the dynamics of this trade in dramatic ways, changing kingdoms and reshaping economic priorities. While West Africa was an equal partner for the first two and a half centuries of this period, Green shows how the growing demand for slaves and the very different nature of slavery in the West during this period combined increasingly disadvantaged the region, while simultaneously changing the internal political dynamics of kingdoms and the societies within them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Soul is one of those concepts that is often evoked, but rarely satisfactorily defined. In The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Duke University Press 2020), Emily J. Lordi takes on the challenge of explaining “soul,” through a book that zooms in and out between sweeping ideas about suffering and resilience in Black culture and fine-grained, close readings of individual performances by soul musicians. Rather than centering big musical gestures and major popular hits, Lordi pays close attention to musical practices like falsetto, ad-libs, and false endings to ground her analysis. She focuses on artists that are some of the most recognizable Black singers in the United States such as Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, and James Brown, but she also spends a lot of time with more obscure figures including Donny Hathaway and Minnie Riperton. She ends the book with a powerful contemplation of how the logic of soul, born in the political and social tumult of the late 1960s, still resonates with some of today’s most popular women singers. Emily J. Lordi is an Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. The Meaning of Soul is her third book. In addition to her scholarly work, she is an active cultural critic and music journalist published in venues such as Billboard, The Atlantic, and NPR. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

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 center from these misleading, tired clichés, The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power (Princeton University Press, 2019), highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America. Following Boston’s development over three centuries, Mark Peterson, the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of History at Yale University, discusses how this self-governing Atlantic trading center began as a refuge from Britain’s Stuart monarchs and how—through its bargain with slavery and ratification of the Constitution—it would tragically lose integrity and autonomy as it became incorporated into the greater United States. Drawing from vast archives, and featuring unfamiliar figures alongside well-known ones, such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and John Adams, Peterson explores Boston’s origins in sixteenth-century utopian ideals, its founding and expansion into the hinterland of New England, and the growth of its distinctive political economy, with ties to the West Indies and southern Europe. By the 1700s, Boston was at full strength, with wide Atlantic trading circuits and cultural ties, both within and beyond Britain’s empire. After the cataclysmic Revolutionary War, “Bostoners” aimed to negotiate a relationship with the American confederation, but through the next century, the new United States unraveled Boston’s regional reign. The fateful decision to ratify the Constitution undercut its power, as Southern planters and slave owners dominated national politics and corroded the city-state’s vision of a common good for all. Peeling away the layers of myth surrounding a revered city, The City-State of Boston offers a startlingly fresh understanding of America’s history. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organized around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term “animal style,” this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia.  In Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh UP, 2024) Art historian Petya Andreeva’s research shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbors to showcase worldliness and control over the nomadic “other.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Alfred Peredo Flores argues that the US occupation of the island of Guåhan (Guam), one of the most heavily militarised islands in the western Pacific Ocean, was enabled by a process of settler militarism. During World War II and the Cold War, Guåhan was a launching site for both covert and open US military operations in the region, a strategically significant role that turned Guåhan into a crucible of US overseas empire. In 1962, the US Navy lost the authority to regulate all travel to and from the island, and a tourist economy eventually emerged that changed the relationship between the Indigenous CHamoru population and the US military, further complicating the process of settler colonialism on the island. The US military occupation of Guåhan was based on a co-constitutive process that included CHamoru land dispossession, discursive justifications for the remaking of the island, the racialization of civilian military labour, and the military's policing of interracial intimacies. Within a narrative that emphasises CHamoru resilience, resistance, and survival, Dr. Flores uses a working class labour analysis to examine how the militarization of Guåhan was enacted by a minority settler population to contribute to the US government's hegemonic presence in Oceania. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Myths about the powers held by the United States are often supported by the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, which derives its logic from the interpretation of a document that the US itself developed. Therefore, when pressure is placed on a specific legal precedent, the shallowness of its validity is revealed. Dr. Mónica A. Jiménez accomplishes this kind of scholarly work in her recently published book Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). By tracing the legal logic of what continues to animate the colonial dynamics between the United States and Puerto Rico, Jiménez offers a “genealogy of racial exclusion in law” (36) that both folds time and space to make clear how late-19th century Supreme Court logics and opinions continue to subjugate the land and people of Puerto Rico to colonial violence. Split into two sections, the first half of the book details the key case Downes v. Bidwell (1901), while the second half explores how the legal ramifications of Downes continued to haunt the archipelago. The first chapter focuses on the development of Downes and its outcome, which argued that territories of the United States were not allowed to access certain provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The ambiguous legal foundation for this decision was established in 1900 after Puerto Rico was acquired by the United States when the US Supreme Court established the territorial incorporation doctrine, effectively creating the legal category of “unincorporated territory." Chapter two probes the white supremacist U.S. legal landscape to offer a “genealogy of racial exclusion in law” (36) that shows the reader how U.S. settler colonialism and empire-making are dependent on the reuse and recycling of legal precedents and tactics that disenfranchised and dispossessed racially marginalized communities. By excavating the legal opinions handed down during the Marshal Trilolgy and Dred Scott v. Sandford – a collection of Supreme Court cases that defined 19th-century legal policy for Native Americans and African Americans, respectively – Jiménez makes clear that “It is not a coincidence that the most shameful cases in the United States’ legal history of race should serve as direct precedents to a decision that continues to serve as the basis for Puerto Rico’s exclusion more than one hundred years after it was handed down” (9). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

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 University Press, 2019) and the behind-the-scene details of its making. Ghodsee is a professor in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of nine books and many more articles and essays. Second World, Second Sex addresses a telling gap in the historiography of women rights movements – the contributions of the Second World women rights activists. While careful not to idealize the socialist authoritarian regimes, Ghodsee reveals how deeply problematic and unfair it is to define feminism based on Western-inspired definitions of self-fulfillment or grassroot activism and to dismiss the achievements of women’s state organizations in the Eastern bloc as top-down policies and socialist propaganda. Aiming to retell the UN Decade for Women from a non-Western perspective, this book follows the participation of the Bulgarian and Zambian delegations in the international conferences in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985). The author makes use of a painstaking multi-site archival research and compassionate oral histories, to reconstruct the conferences and their context of arduous preparations and ideological tensions. The book’s approach to the conferences is very factual but also offers a lot of context, which helps the reader to better understand the main points of conflict between the Western delegates and the delegates from the developing and non-aligning countries. Ironically, what was rebranded in the 1990’s as “intersectionality” was the main argument of the state socialist women activists much earlier, namely, that the discussions of women’s rights separately from other social injustices such as racism, imperialism and colonialism are ultimately futile. Curiously enough, Ghodsee’s comparative overview of the state of women’s rights before the UN Decade reveals that socialist states were forerunners of women’s rights with generous maternal leaves and state-run childcare among others. Moreover, the author reminds us, that the US government’s attention to women’s issues in the 1960s was actually a direct response to the threat coming from the USSR where women’s brains and forces were put into service of the rivalry with the West. Thus, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, Ghodsee sees the current political and cultural hegemony of the West as rather disadvantageous in terms women’s rights. There is no rivalry to push governments to do better and women remaining in the periphery hardly benefit from having equal access to the free market in their crime-ridden and economically dependent from the West countries with dismantled welfare systems. Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Collapse of Heaven: The Taiping Civil War and Chinese Literature and Culture, 1850-1880 (Harvard UP, 2024) investigates a long-neglected century in Chinese literature through the lens of the Taiping War (1851–1864), one of the most devastating civil wars in human history. With the war as the pivot, Huan Jin examines the manifold literary and cultural transformations that occurred from the 1850s to the 1880s. The book analyzes a wide range of writings—proselytizing pamphlets, diaries, poetry, a full-length novel, drama, and short stories—with a particular emphasis on the materiality of these texts as well as their production and dissemination.  Tracing allusions to political turbulences across many genres, Jin discusses how late imperial Chinese literary and cultural paradigms began to unravel under conditions of extreme violence and tracks the unexpected reinventions of literary conventions that marked the beginning of Chinese literary modernity. In addition to making a significant contribution to Chinese studies, this book offers an important comparative perspective on the global nineteenth century and engages with broad scholarly discussions on religion, violence, narrative, history, gender, theater, and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Jonathan Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Initially viewed as a covert revival of slavery, indenture caused a scandal in Britain and India. But over time, economic conflict in the colonies altered public perceptions of indenture, now increasingly viewed as a legitimate form of free labor and a means of preserving the promise of abolition. Connolly explains how the large-scale, state-sponsored migration of Indian subjects to work on sugar plantations across Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad transformed both the notion of post-slavery free labor and the political economy of emancipation. Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labor were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process. In so doing, he advances an original interpretation of how indenture changed the meaning of “freedom” in a post-abolition world. Jonathan Connolly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago. Connolly is a historian of the British empire with transnational interests in migration, the history of emancipation, and legal history. His research primarily concerns abolition and emancipation, imperial political and legal culture, and the category of free labor in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.  Your host for this episode is Mahishan Gnanaseharan, a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University. Mahishan studies the social, political, and intellectual histories of South Asian migrants across the Indian Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What does the history of men tell us about life today? In Men and Masculinities in Modern Britain: A History for the Present (Manchester UP, 2024), the editors Matt Houlbrook, a Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham, Katie Jones, an independent scholar living in Birmingham, and Ben Mechen, an Associate Lecturer in Modern British History at University College London, bring together a range of essays presenting historical research and contemporary reflections on both the history and historiography of men. The collection is organised into four themes across institutions, histories, everyday lives and bodies. The themes gather an eclectic yet interrelated set of chapters ranging from how bureaucracy intersects with race and gender, through reflections on sexuality and censorship, to place based analysis of work and communities. Essential reading for both historians and anyone interested in understanding contemporary society, the book is available open access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Recent proposals to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era and ongoing Western interest in China’s growth and development have led to increased attention to the concept of pan-Asianism. Most of that discussion, however, lacks any historical grounding in the thought of influential twentieth-century pan-Asianists. In Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2023), Viren Murthy offers an intellectual history of the writings of theorists, intellectuals, and activists—spanning leftist, conservative, and right-wing thinkers—who proposed new ways of thinking about Asia in their own historical and political contexts.  Tracing pan-Asianist discourse across the twentieth century, Murthy reveals a stronger tradition of resistance and alternative visions than the contemporary discourse on pan-Asianism would suggest. At the heart of pan-Asianist thinking, Murthy shows, were the notions of a unity of Asian nations, of weak nations becoming powerful, and of the Third World confronting the “advanced world” on equal terms—an idea that grew to include non-Asian countries into the global community of Asian nations. But pan-Asianists also had larger aims, imagining a future beyond both imperialism and capitalism. The fact that the resurgence of pan-Asianist discourse has emerged alongside the dominance of capitalism, Murthy argues, signals a profound misunderstanding of its roots, history, and potential. Viren Murthy is a Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His previous book include Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness and The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future. His current project concerns how East Asian intellectuals drew on G.W.F Hegel to uncover logics to Chinese and Japanese history, which culminate in a new world order inspired by their respective cultures. Nick Zeller is a senior program associate for The Carter Center's China Focus initiative and managing editor of the English-language U.S.-China Perception Monitor. Prior to joining China Focus, Nick was a Visiting Assistant Professor of World History in Kennesaw State University’s Department of History and Philosophy, Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian History in the University of South Carolina’s Department of History, and an NSEP Boren Fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He received his Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Alliances among ideological enemies confronting a common foe, or "frenemy" alliances, are unlike coalitions among ideologically-similar states facing comparable threats. Members of frenemy alliances are perpetually torn by two powerful opposing forces. Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally (Cornell University Press, 2022) shows that shared material threats push these states together while ideological differences pull them apart. Each of these competing forces has dominated the other at critical times. This difference has resulted in stable alliances among ideological enemies in some cases but the delay, dissolution, or failure of these alliances in others. This book examines how states' susceptibility to major domestic ideological changes and the nature of the ideological differences among countries provide the key to alliance formation or failure. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of critical historical and contemporary cases, from the failure of British and French leaders to ally with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in the 1930s to the likely evolution of the United States' alliance system against a rising China in the early 21st century. In Frenemies, author Mark Haas develops a groundbreaking argument that explains the origins and durability of alliances among ideological enemies and offers policy-guiding perspectives on a subject at the core of international relations. Our guests today is Mark Haas, Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The rise of agrarian capitalism in Britain is usually told as a story about markets, land and wages. The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. James Fisher reveals that it was also about books, knowledge and expertise. It argues that during the early modern period, farming books were a key tool in the appropriation of the traditional art of husbandry possessed by farm workers of all kinds. It challenges the dominant narrative of an agricultural 'enlightenment', in which books merely spread useful knowledge, by showing how codified knowledge was used to assert greater managerial control over land and labour. The proliferation of printed books helped divide mental and manual labour to facilitate emerging social divisions between labourers, managers and landowners. The cumulative effect was the slow enclosure of customary knowledge. By synthesising diverse theoretical insights, this study opens up a new social history of agricultural knowledge and reinvigorates long-term histories of knowledge under capitalism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023) focuses on the intersections of three entities otherwise deemed marginal in historical scholarship: the Jazira region, the borderlands of today’s Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; the mobile peoples within this region, from nomadic pastoralists to deportees and refugees; and locusts. Sam Dolbee’s research traces the movements of people and insects within this region, and how the social “problem” of mobile peoples and the environmental problem of pests were conflated in the eyes of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman states. Following the path of the locust across this region reveals how the desert of the Jazira and its inhabitants were bordered, transformed by, and participated in both environmental and political projects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

I Spit On Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies (Headpress, 2024) by Heidi Honeycutt is the first book-length history of female horror directors from the late 1800s to present day. Having conducted hundreds of interviews and watched thousands of horror films, Honeycutt defines the political and cultural forces that shape the way modern horror movies are made by women. The women's rights and civil rights movements, new distribution technology, digital cameras, the destruction of the classic studio system, and the abandonment of the Hays code have significantly impacted women directors and their movies. So, too, social media, modern ideas of gender and racial equality, LGBTQ acceptance, and a new generation of provocative, daring films that take shocking risks in the genre. Includes short films, anthologies, documentaries, animated horror, horror pornography, pink films, and experimental horror.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

When Hitler marched into Austria in March 1938, he was given a rapturous reception. Millions lined the streets and filled the squares of Vienna. Tobias Portschy, a self-appointed regional Nazi chief, considered what to give the Fuhrer for his birthday, and devised a particular gift from the Austrian people: the elimination of Jewish life in the Burgenland, picturesque farming country about 70 km south-east of Vienna. Eichmann took note of the brutal methodology. The Holocaust had begun.  Burgenland: Village Secrets and the First Tremors of the Holocaust (Amberley, 2023) is an astonishing survey of Jewish history in Central Europe, an account of the opening salvo of what turned into the systematic industrial-scale genocide of European Jewry, a stern examination of British policy and the world's wholly inadequate response. It is also a deeply personal memoir and family history. Impeccably researched and hugely ambitious in scope, it narrates the full arc of the Jewish experience in Central Europe over 300 years, following the lives of one family who played a significant part in events described, from the struggle for civil liberties to the resistance to fascism and the rise of Zionism. David Joseph has dissected an uncomfortable history, and the results demand a substantial reassessment of the orthodox narrative around the Holocaust both in Britain and in Austria. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Does Southeast Asia “exist”? It’s a real question: Southeast Asia is a geographic region encompassing many different cultures, religions, political styles, historical experiences, and languages, economies. Can we think of this part of the world as one cohesive “place”? Eric Thompson, in his book The Story of Southeast Asia (NUS Press: 2024), suggests that we can, as he tells the region’s history from way back in prehistory, through its time as Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms, the introduction of Islam and Theravada Buddhism, and ending in the present day. Eric C. Thompson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. He is author of Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia (NUS Press: 2006) co-author of Attitudes and Awareness Towards ASEAN: Findings of a Ten-Nation Survey (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies: 2008) and Do Young People Know ASEAN? Update of a Ten-nation Survey (Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute: 2016), and co-editor of Southeast Asian Anthropologies: National Traditions and Transnational Practices (NUS Press: 2019) and Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective (Amsterdam University Press: 2019). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Story of Southeast Asia. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor. In Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (U Chicago Press, 2024), Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans’s culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

During the night of 25 July 1941, assassins planted a time bomb in the bed of the former French Interior Minister, Marx Dormoy. The explosion on the following morning launched a two-year investigation that traced Dormoy's murder to the highest echelons of the Vichy regime. Dormoy, who had led a 1937 investigation into the "Cagoule," a violent right-wing terrorist organization, was the victim of a captivating revenge plot. Based on the meticulous examination of thousands of documents, Assassination in Vichy: Marx Dormoy and the Struggle for the Soul of France (U Toronto Press, 2020) tells the story of Dormoy's murder and the investigation that followed. At the heart of this book lies a true crime that was sensational in its day. A microhistory that tells a larger and more significant story about the development of far-right political movements, domestic terrorism, and the importance of courage, Assassination in Vichy explores the impact of France's deep political divisions, wartime choices, and post-war memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Watching the footage of the January 6 insurrection, Professor Bradley Onishi wondered: If I hadn't left evangelicalism, would I have been there? Today’s book is: Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next (Broadleaf Books, 2023), by Dr. Bradley Onishi, which unpacks recent U.S. history to show how the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 was not a blip or an aberration. It was the logical outcome of years of a White evangelical subculture's preparation for war. Religion scholar and former insider Bradley Onishi maps the origins of White Christian nationalism and traces its offshoots. Combining his own experiences in the youth groups and prayer meetings of the 1990s with an immersive look at the steady blending of White grievance politics with evangelicalism, Dr. Onishi crafts an engrossing account of the years-long campaign of White Christian nationalism that led to January 6. How did the rise of what Onishi calls the New Religious Right, between 1960 and 2015, give birth to violent White Christian nationalism during the Trump presidency and beyond? What propelled some of the most conservative religious communities in the country—communities of which Dr. Onishi was once a part—to ignite a cold civil war? Through chapters on White supremacy and segregationist theologies, conspiracy theories, the Christian-school movement, purity culture, and the right-wing media ecosystem, Professor Onishi pulls back the curtain on a subculture. Our guest is: Dr. Brad Onishi, who is a scholar of religion and cohost of the Straight White American Jesus podcast. His writing has been published in the New York Times, LA Review of Books, and Religion & Politics, among other outlets. He holds degrees from Azusa Pacific University, Oxford University, and L'institut catholique de Paris, and received his PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara. A TEDx speaker and the author, editor, or translator of four previous books, Dr. Onishi teaches at the University of San Francisco. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and daughter. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell. Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us here again to learn from even more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A group of landholding elites waged psychological warfare on the El Salvadoran people, and oppressed them for generations. When a psychologist and Jesuit priest defended the rationality of the people against their oppressors, he paid the ultimate price. This is episode three of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. You can also listen to the trailer for next week’s episode, the (ir)Rational Public. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Mental health care and its radical possibilities reimagined in the context of its global development under capitalism. The contemporary world is oversaturated with psychiatric programs, methods, and reforms promising to address any number of "crises" in mental health care. When these fail, alternatives to the alternatives simply pile up and seem to lead nowhere. In an original and compelling account of radical experimentation in psychiatry, Warren traces a double movement in the global development of mental health services throughout the 20th century: a radical current pushing totalizing and idealistic visions of care to their practical limits and a reactionary one content with managing or eliminating chronically idle surplus populations. Moral treatment is read in light of the utopian socialist movement; the theory of communication in the French Institutional Psychotherapy of Félix Guattari is put into conversation with the Brazilian art therapy of Nise da Silveira; the Mexican anti-psychiatry movement's reflections on violence are thought together with theories of violence developed in Argentinian psychoanalysis and Frantz Fanon's anticolonial therapeutic practice; the social form of the Italian Democratic Psychiatry and Brazilian anti-institutional movements are contrasted with the anti-psychiatry factions of the 1960s-70s North American counterculture. Storming Bedlam: Madness, Mental Health, and Revolt (Common Notions, 2024) subverts the divisions between social and biological approaches to mental health or between psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. By exploring the history of psychiatry in the context of revolution, war, and economic development, Warren outlines a minor history of approaches to mental health care grounded in common struggles against conditions of scarcity, poverty, isolation, and exploitation. Sasha Warren is a writer based in Minneapolis. His experiences within the psychiatric system and commitment to radical politics led him to cofound the group Hearing Voices Twin Cities, which provides an alternative social space for individuals to discuss often stigmatized extreme experiences and network with one-another. Following the George Floyd Uprising in 2020, he founded the project Of Unsound Mind to trace the histories of psychiatry, social work, and public health's connections to policing, prisons, and various disciplinary and managerial technologies. Resources: North American Networks of Alternatives to Psychiatry altpsy.net Of Unsound Mind Substack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024), historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women. The dismissal of “Black violence” as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Force—from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt—has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions. But violence is only one tool among many. Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away. Clear-eyed, impassioned, and ultimately hopeful, We Refuse offers a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience, and a path toward liberation. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

This episode features a conversation with Dr. William Gow on his recently published book, Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community (Stanford University Press, 2024), focuses on the 1930s and 1940s Los Angeles–its Chinatowns, and “city,” as well as the Chinese American community’s relationship with Hollywood. Chinatown and Hollywood, Gow argues, represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial difference for popular audiences during the Chinese exclusion era. As he will illustrate later in this conversation, Chinese Americans in Los Angeles used these performances in Hollywood films and in Chinatown for tourists to shape widely-held understandings of race and national belonging during this pivotal chapter in U.S. history. Performing Chinatown builds on Gow’s background as a historian, educator, and documentary filmmaker–even incorporating his own family’s history with Hollywood throughout the book’s opening and closing. A fourth-generation Chinese American and a proud graduate of the San Francisco Unified School District, he holds an M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. Before receiving his doctorate, he taught history for nearly a decade in California public schools. For the past 20 years, he has also served as a volunteer historian with the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (CHSSC), a non-profit in Los Angeles Chinatown. At the CHSSC, he is the co-director of the Five Chinatowns project, documenting the history of the five Chinatowns that existed in Los Angeles before 1965. He is presently an assistant professor of Asian American and Ethnic Studies at Cal State Sacramento. Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From ancient times to the modern world, the idea of the Faustian bargain—the exchange of one’s soul in return for untold riches and power—has exerted a magnetic pull upon our collective imaginations. In Devil's Contract: A History of the Faustian Bargain (Melville House, 2024), Dr. Ed Simon takes us on a historical tour of the Faustian bargain, from the Bible to blues, and illustrates how the instinct for sacrificing our principles in exchange for power models all kinds of social ills, from colonialism to nuclear warfare, and even social media, climate change, and AI. In doing so, Simon conveys just how much the Faustian bargain shows us about power and evil … and about ourselves. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

When Americans and other citizens of advanced capitalist countries think of humanitarianism, they think of charitable efforts to help people displaced by war, disaster, and oppression find new homes where they can live complete lives.  However, as the historian Laura Robson argues in her book Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work (Verso, 2023), the history of the international refugee regime is much less noble than the self-representation of humanitarian organizations (and the global powers that fund them) would suggest. Robson shows how imperial powers, nation-states, global corporations, and intergovernmental organizations have sought to remake refugees into disposable migrant laborers whose exploitation would advance various imperial and state-building projects. Laura Robson is a Professor of History at Yale University. Her recent books include States of Separation: Transfer, partition, and the making of the modern Middle East (2017) and The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East (2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. Dr. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region (University of Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how freight trains, commuter rail, and Amtrak influenced—and in turn were shaped by—centuries of American industrial expansion, metropolitan growth, downtown decline, and revitalization. Paying as much attention to Aberdeen, Trenton, New Rochelle, and Providence as to New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Dr. David Alff provides narrative thrills for history buffs, train enthusiasts, and adventurers alike. What’s more, he offers a glimpse into the future of the corridor. New infrastructural plans—supported by President Joe Biden, famously Amtrak’s biggest fan—envision ever-faster trains zipping along technologically advanced rails. Yet those tracks will literally sit atop a history that links the life of Frederick Douglass, who fled to freedom by boarding a train in Baltimore, to the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, which is expected to be the newest link in the corridor by 2032. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Karine Varley's book Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War (Cambridge UP, 2023) advances a significant new interpretation of French collaboration during the Second World War. Arguing that the path to collaboration involved not merely Nazi Germany but Fascist Italy, it suggests that the Vichy French government was caught in a double bind. On the one hand, many of the threats to France's territory, colonial empire and power came from Rome as well as Berlin. On the other, Vichy was caught between the irreconcilable yet inescapable positions of the two Axis governments. Unable to resolve the conflict, Vichy sought to play the two Axis powers against each other.  By exploring French dealings with Italy at diplomatic, military and local levels in France and its colonial empire, Double Bind reveals the multi-dimensional and multi-directional nature of Vichy's policy. It therefore challenges many enduring conceptions of collaboration with reference to Franco-German relations and offers a fresh perspective on debates about Vichy France and collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The story of four remarkable women who shaped the intellectual history of the 20th century: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. On the cusp of the Second World War, four women went to Oxford to begin their studies: a fiercely brilliant Catholic convert; a daughter of privilege longing to escape her stifling upbringing; an ardent Communist and aspiring novelist with a list of would-be lovers as long as her arm; and a quiet, messy lover of newts and mice who would become a great public intellectual of our time. They became lifelong friends. At the time, only a handful of women had ever made lives in philosophy. But when Oxford's men were drafted in the war, everything changed. As Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch labored to make a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, as they made friendships and families, and as they drifted toward and away from each other, they never stopped insisting that some lives are better than others. They argued that courage and discernment and justice--and love--are the heart of a good life. The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (Oxford UP, 2021) presents the first sustained engagement with these women's contributions: with the critique and the alternative they framed. Drawing on a cluster of recently opened archives and extensive correspondence and interviews with those who knew them best, Benjamin Lipscomb traces the lives and ideas of four friends who gave us a better way to think about ethics, and ourselves. Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Honors Program at Houghton University. He lives with his family in Fillmore, New York, when his teaching doesn't call him to London for a season. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (U Chicago Press, 2024) is a fascinating and engaging historical tour of those who were gay and active in Republican and conservative politics over the course of the last 80 years. Neil J. Young has written an accessible and deeply sources book that brings forward stories about those in the closet, those out of the closet, and in some cases, the move to come out as gay in Republican politics and in conservative activism. Young explains early on that part of the impetus for the book is the contemporary question: why would anyone be a gay Republican? But the discussion is far from simple, and the book traces more than eight decades of history focusing on the evolution and changing ideology of the Republican Party while also exploring different factions within the party, in a variety of places and regions in the United States. All of this is woven together to provide a lively history. Young himself is part of this history, as he explains his own political evolution and his personal story. One of the points that becomes clear in Coming Out Republican is that there are distinctions between conservativism and Republican politics. It is also undeniable from the research and the history that the individuals who are gay Republicans, either in the 1950s or in the 1980s or in the 2020s, are generally middle- or upper-class white men. The book starts in the 1950s in Washington, D.C., where a number of closeted gay men were instrumental in fundraising and political activism for both the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Young also notes that Washington, D.C. at this time had a lively gay community. What is fascinating with this starting point is that these gay men were adamantly anti-Communist, as Young explains it, they were essentially creating a kind of closet for themselves that protected them from many of the homophobic attacks that were made during the McCarthy era. Moving through historical periods and back and forth across the country, Young traces the different kinds of activists and the causes within the Republican party that animated them—personal freedom and liberty, bodily autonomy, fiscal conservativism, anti-statism, etc.—alongside the evolution of the Republican Party itself, which integrates white Evangelical voters, especially from the South, during this same time period.  Coming Out Republican provides the reader with essentially two historical accounts, focusing on the role and place of gay Republicans and conservatives within the party and the conservative movement as a whole, while also delineating the shifts in the conversative movement towards the New Right, and a Republican Party that highlights socially conservative policy, which tends to be more limiting of individual freedom and bodily autonomy. Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right also outlines the other side of the LGBTQ movement, teasing out how those on the left were or were not engaged in the quest for equal rights and full citizenship for LGBTQ individuals. This is a really interesting assessment, since it pulls out competing approaches to rights advocacy and political advocacy, and also spotlights the places and times when advocacy was absent. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In Contraception: A Concise History (The MIT Press, 2020), Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs's clinic to the present. Drucker approaches the subject from the perspective of reproductive justice: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children safely and healthily. Drucker describes contraceptive methods available before the pill, including the diaphragm (dispensed at the Jacobs clinic) and condom, spermicidal jellies, and periodic abstinences. She looks at the development and dissemination of the pill and its chemical descendants; describes technological developments in such non-hormonal contraceptives as the cervical cap and timing methods (including the “rhythm method” favored by the Roman Catholic church); and explains the concept of reproductive justice. Finally, Drucker considers the future of contraception—the adaptations of existing methods, new forms of distribution, and ongoing efforts needed to support contraceptive access Dr. Donna Drucker leads the English as the Language for Instruction Project, which helps faculty, administrative staff, scientific staff, and students at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany) improve their English abilities for teaching and learning. Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Mexican Revolution: A Documentary History (Hackett, 2022), "Henderson and Buchenau have done an excellent and thoughtful job of collecting a wide range of voices for students to learn about the Mexican Revolution and its causes, both from ‘above’ and from ‘below’. I’m particularly appreciative of the authors’ inclusion of women’s voices and women’s issues of the era, including the point of view of the first woman elected to public office in Mexico. They deserve praise for including documents that complicate widely accepted, heroic revolutionary narratives of the period for students—such as the experience of soldaderas and the massacre of Chinese people in Torreón. It is also worth mentioning that the editors have done an admirable job in choosing documents from across Mexico’s many diverse and heterogenous regions. The general Introduction is excellent; it is both accurate and highly readable for students. It is no easy feat to succinctly describe both the events and the significance of this period in Mexican history as the authors have done here."—Sarah Osten, The University of Vermont Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Hellenistic period was a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish priesthood. The waning days of the Persian empire coincided with the continued ascendance of the high priest and Jerusalem temple as powerful political, cultural, and religious institutions in Judea. The Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran, only recently published in full, testify to the existence of a flourishing but previously unknown Jewish literary tradition dating from the end of Persian rule to the rise of the Hasmoneans.  In Priesthood, Cult, and Temple in the Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran: Analyzing a Pre-Hasmonean Jewish Literary Tradition (Brill, 2023), Robert Jones analyzes how Israel's priestly institutions are represented in these writings, and he demonstrates that they are essential for understanding the Jewish priesthood at this crucial stage in its history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Imagine: it's the year 1600 and you've lost your precious silver spoons, or maybe they've been stolen. Perhaps your child has a fever. Or you're facing a trial. Maybe you're looking for love or escaping a husband. What do you do? In medieval and early modern Europe, your first port of call might have been cunning folk: practitioners of “service magic.” Neither feared (like witches), nor venerated (like saints), they were essential to daily life. For people across ages, genders, and social ranks, practical magic was a cherished resource for navigating life's many challenges. In historian Tabitha Stanmore's beguiling account, we meet lovelorn widows, dissolute nobles, selfless healers, and renegade monks. We listen in on Queen Elizabeth I's astrology readings and track treasure hunters trying to unearth buried gold without upsetting the fairies that guard it. Much like us, premodern people lived in a bewildering world, buffeted by forces beyond their control. As Stanmore reveals, their faith in magic has much to teach about how to accommodate the irrational in our allegedly enlightened lives today. Charming in every sense, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic (Bloombury, 2024) is at once an immersive reconstruction of a bygone era and a thought-provoking commentary on the beauty and bafflement of being human. Tabitha Stanmore, PhD, is a specialist in medieval and early modern magic. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Law and Humanities (Anthem Press, 2024), Professor Russell Sandberg and Dr Daniel Newman provide an accessible introduction to the law and humanities. Each chapter explores the nature, development and possible further trajectory of a disciplinary ‘law and’ field, tackling a wide ranging series of topics as law and geography, law and history, law and literature, law and theatre. Each chapter is written by an expert in the respective field and addresses how the two disciplines of law and the other respective field operate. This edited work fulfils a real and pressing need to provide an accessible, introductory but critical guide to law and humanities as a whole by exploring how each disciplinary ‘law and’ field has developed, contributes to further scrutinizing the content and role of law, and how it can contribute and be enriched by being understood within the law and humanities tradition as a whole. In the podcast, Professor Sandberg and Dr Newman explain their aims in editing this collection, and how in particular studying law and the respective humanities can enhance a legal studies curriculum beyond the confines of an exclusively doctrinal education. The editors also explore in detail the chapters they authored – Law and History, Law and Philosophy and Law and Religion, before offering some reflections on and hopes for the future of the broader Law and Humanities discipline. Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. LinkedIn. His recent publications include: “‘Poetic Justice Products’: International Justice, Victim Counter-Aesthetics, and the Spectre of the Show Trial” in Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Rob Knox (eds) Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, 2024, ISBN 978-1-910761-17-5) "Lawyers who want to make the world a better place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering" in D. Newman (ed.) Leading Works on the Legal Profession (Routledge, July 2023), ISBN 978-1-032182-80-3) “International Prosecutors as Cause Lawyers" (2021) Journal of International Criminal Justice 19(4) 803-830 (ISSN 1478-1387) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1900, Britain and America were in the grip of a cat craze. An animal that had for centuries been seen as a household servant or urban nuisance had now become an object of pride and deep affection. From presidential and royal families who imported exotic breeds to working-class men competing for cash prizes for the fattest tabby, people became enthralled to the once-humble cat. Multiple industries sprang up to feed this new obsession, selling everything from veterinary services to leather bootees via dedicated cat magazines. Cats themselves were now traded for increasingly large sums of money, bolstered by elaborate pedigrees that claimed noble ancestry and promised aesthetic distinction. Dr. Kathryn Hughes chronicles the cat craze of the early twentieth century through the life and career of Louis Wain. In the US the book is titled Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) and in the UK is called Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World (Fourth Estate, 2024). Wain's anthropomorphic drawings of cats in top hats falling in love, sipping champagne, golfing, driving cars, and piloting planes are some of the most instantly recognizable images from the era. His round-faced fluffy characters established the prototype for the modern cat, which cat "fanciers" were busily trying to achieve using their newfound knowledge of the latest scientific breeding techniques. Despite being a household name, Wain endured multiple bankruptcies and mental breakdowns, spending his last fifteen years in an asylum, drawing abstract and multicolored felines. But it was his ubiquitous anthropomorphic cats that helped usher the formerly reviled creatures into homes across Europe. Beautifully illustrated and based on new archival findings about Wain's life, the wider cat fancy, and the media frenzy it created, Catland chronicles the fascinating history of how the modern cat emerged. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Elizabeth Cohen, Professor Emerita at York University, joins Jana Byars to talk about her new volume, Non-Elite Women's Networks Across the Early Modern World (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), edited with Marilee Couling. Non-elite or marginalized early modern women-among them the poor, migrants, members of religious or ethnic minorities, abused or abandoned wives, servants, and sex workers-have seldom left records of their experiences. Drawing on a variety of sources, including trial records, administrative paperwork, letters, pamphlets, hagiography, and picaresque literature, this volume explores how, as social agents, these doubly invisible women built and used networks and informal alliances to supplement the usual structures of family and community that often let them down. Ten essays, ranging widely in geography from the eastern Mediterranean to colonial Spanish America and in time from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, show how flexible, sometimes ad hoc relationships could provide crucial practical and emotional support for women who faced problems of livelihood, reputation, displacement, and violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius (Oxford UP, 2024) explores the impact of climate change on early modern radical religious groups during the height of the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century. Focusing on the life and legacy of Johannes Kelpius (1667-1707), an enormously influential but comprehensively misunderstood theologian who settled outside of Philadelphia from 1604 to 1707, Timothy Grieve-Carlson explores the Hermetic and alchemical dimensions of Kelpius's Christianity before turning to his legacy in American religion and literature.  This engaging analysis showcases Kelpius's forgotten theological intricacies, spiritual revelations, and cosmic observations, illuminating the complexity and foresight of an important colonial mystic. As radical Protestants during Kelpius's lifetime struggled to understand their changing climate and a seemingly eschatological cosmos, esoteric texts became crucial sources of meaning. Grieve-Carlson presents original translations of Kelpius's university writings, which have never been published in English, along with analyses and translations of other important sources from the period in German and Latin. Ultimately, American Aurora points toward a time and place when climate change caused an eruption of esoteric thought and practice and how this moment has been largely forgotten. Timothy Grieve-Carlson is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Westminster College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

There were 20,000 miles of railways in 1865 and about a million by 2020. Scale has always been a key theme in railway history. In the First World War, the London and North West Railway transported 325,000 miles of barbed wire and over twelve million pairs of army boots. At the end of the twentieth century, Indian Railways sold 4.5 billion tickets annually. In A World History of Rail: From the Steam Regime to Today (Amberley Publishing, 2023), Jeremy Black examines how rail transformed the world. While always shaped by commercial interests, the role of the railway was (and is) strategic in the broadest sense: like Roman roads and Chinese canals, it helped develop the economic links that sustained and strengthened the major powers. For example, the railway was fundamental in integrating the frontiers of settlement with the world economy, in the spread of cultivation and ranching, and in the exploitation of mining opportunities. Rail expanded the 'logistical space' of most states. To give one modern example of the political importance of rail, Ukraine's railway is on the 1.52 metre gauge, rather than the 1.435 metre one used in Poland and most of Europe. In 2022, Denys Shmyhal, Ukraine's Prime Minister, declared that the railways there would be rebuilt to the European gauge. This enhanced capability would counter the Russian ability to blockade Ukraine's Black Sea ports, notably Odessa. The plan was not endorsed by the Kremlin... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Jainism originated in India and shares some features with Buddhism and Hinduism, but it is a distinct tradition with its own key texts, art, rituals, beliefs, and history. One important way it has often been distinguished from Buddhism and Hinduism is through the highly contested category of Tantra: Jainism, unlike the others, does not contain a tantric path to liberation.  But in Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation (U Chicago Press, 2021), historian of religions Ellen Gough refines and challenges our understanding of Tantra by looking at the development over two millennia of a Jain incantation, or mantra, that evolved from an auspicious invocation in a second-century text into a key component of mendicant initiations and meditations that continue to this day. Typically, Jainism is characterized as a celibate, ascetic path to liberation in which one destroys karma through austerities, while the tantric path to liberation is characterized as embracing the pleasures of the material world, requiring the ritual use of mantras to destroy karma. Gough, however, argues that asceticism and Tantra should not be viewed in opposition to one another. She does so by showing that Jains perform "tantric" rituals of initiation and meditation on mantras and maṇḍalas. Jainism includes kinds of tantric practices, Gough provocatively argues, because tantric practices are a logical extension of the ascetic path to liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The psychological establishment has long pathologized diverse forms of sexual identity and gender expression. In the mid-century, a brave movement of gays and lesbians fought back and claimed: no, actually, we’re healthy. But in the process, did they define other identities unhealthy? This is episode two of Cited Podcast's returning season, the Rationality Wars. It tells stories about the political and intellectual battles to define rationality and irrational. For the rest of the series, visit citedpodcast.com. You will be able find this on all the relevant podcatchers (Apple, Spotify, etc.). If you use something else or you cannot find our feed, you can manually add our RSS feed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City (NUS Press, 2024), historian Tim Barnard and his colleagues offer an edited volume of historical and ecological analysis, in which various institutions, perspectives and events involving animals provide insight into the development of Singapore as a modern, urban nation-state, highlighting some of the challenges of planning and development. The book asks the reader to see Singapore's myriad creatures not as mere objects of human action, but as active participants in the making of Singapore’s urban future and will be of interest to scholars of environmental history and lovers of Singapore's nature.  Isobel Akerman is a History PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying biodiversity and botanic gardens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Weight of Words Series continues with Defoe's Britain (St. Augustine's Press, 2023), as historian Jeremy Black uses this writer to interpret Britain in the late 1600s, and likewise looks to the times to interpret the fiction. As seen in previous studies on Christie, Smollett, Fielding, and the Gothic novelists, Black tells the story of the story-teller, and presents the picture of British nationalism that "was the product, history, and record of struggle--collective and individual--as well as its defence. Defoe provides particular accounts of this struggle, both in foreign seas and lands, and at home. This struggle had a moral character that is difficult to capture today." Defoe was an outsider, a man of many interests whom Black asserts evades too precise a portrait or coherent description of character and career. But he is a traveler, in the literal and imaginative senses, and in his engagement with life and its issues and willingness to associate with 'low-life' prefigures later literary giants like Smollett and Fielding. More than the establishment of genre, Defoe created the writer "whose business is observation." Black's account of this parcel of the British past is impeccable because it is in fact an account that the past, in Defoe, gives of itself. "As a writer, Defoe brought together a reality usually presented as, and endorsed by, history, with the imaginative focus of storytelling, and the direction of, variously, propaganda, analysis, and exemplary tale." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Credited with popularizing the label "ex-wife" in 1929, Ursula Parrott wrote provocatively about divorcées, career women, single mothers, work-life balance, and a host of new challenges facing modern women. Her best sellers, Hollywood film deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law made her a household name. Part biography, part cultural history, Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (U California Press, 2024) establishes Parrott's rightful place in twentieth-century American culture, uncovering her neglected work and keen insights into American women's lives during a period of immense social change. Although she was frequently dismissed as a "woman's writer," reading Parrott's writing today makes it clear that she was a trenchant philosopher of modernity—her work was prescient, anticipating issues not widely raised until decades after her decline into obscurity. With elegant wit and a deft command of the archive, Marsha Gordon tells a timely story about the life of a woman on the front lines of a culture war that is still raging today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What does an art history of Instagram look like? Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Tara Ward reveals how Instagram shifts long-established ways of interacting with images. Dr. Ward argues Instagram is a structure of the visual, which includes not just the process of looking, but what can be seen and by whom. She examines features of Instagram use, including the effect of scrolling through images on a phone, the skill involved in taking an “Instagram-worthy” picture, and the desires created by following influencers, to explain how the constraints imposed by Instagram limit the selves that can be displayed on it. The proliferation of technical knowledge, especially among younger women, revitalises on Instagram the myth of the masculine genius and a corresponding reinvigoration of a masculine audience for art. Dr. Ward prompts scholars of art history, gender studies, and media studies to attend to Instagram as a site of visual expression and social consequence. Through its insightful comparative analysis and acute close reading, Appreciation Post argues for art history’s value in understanding the contemporary world and the visual nature of identity today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Surgery & Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Elizabeth O’Brien foregrounds the racial and religious meanings of surgery to draw important connections between historical and contemporary politics regarding fetal and maternal healthcare. She traces practices of caesarean section and coercive Christianization throughout Mexico’s colonial period; patriarchal pregnancy management during republican state formation; and tubal ligation and vaginal bifurcation in Mexico’s twentieth century Eugenics movement. Surgery and Salvation has received several awards including the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies’ Judy Ewell Award; the Latin American Studies Association 2024 Best Book Award for the Nineteenth-Century Section; and Honorable Mention for the 2024 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize (WAWH) as well as the Thomas McGann Prize (RMCLAS). O’Brien is an Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine and Latin American History at the University of California, Los Angeles. In this episode, O'Brien is interviewed by Leah Cargin (PhD candidate, University of Oklahoma). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power relations can produce racially differentiated outcomes? Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard and on the editorial board at Catalyst joined Elizabeth and John back in Fall, 2020, to wrestle with the subtle and complex genealogy of Southern plantation economy and its racist legacy. Adaner offers a complex genealogy of violence, mass incarceration and their roots in the social inequity (and iniquity) of antebellum economic relations. He emphasizes a frequently overlooked fact that a century ago Du Bois had already identified a key issue: the belatedness of African-American access to the social mobility offered by the North's industrialization, thanks to structures of a racist Southern agricultural economy that kept African-American workers away from those high-wage jobs. The result? An explanation for racial injustice that hinges on ossified class imbalances--contingent advantages for certain groups that end up producing (rather than being produced by) bigotry and prejudice. Adaner Usmani and John Clegg, "The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration" (Catalyst 3:3, 2019) Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) Robin Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (2006) Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (2017) Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (1987) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalisation. Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) by Dr. John Soluri upends this, revealing how the exploitation of animals—terrestrial and marine, domesticated and wild, living and dead—was central to the region's transformation from Indigenous lands into the national territories of Argentina and Chile. Drawing on evidence from archives and digital repositories, Dr, Soluri traces the circulation of furs and fibers to explore how the power of fashion stretched far beyond Europe’s houses of haute couture to entangle the fates of Indigenous hunters, migrant workers, and textile manufacturers with those of fur seals, guanacos, and sheep at the "end of the world." From the nineteenth-century rise of commercial hunting to twentieth-century sheep ranching to contemporary conservation-based tourism, Dr, Soluri's narrative explains how struggles for control over the production of commodities and the reproduction of animals drove the social and environmental changes that tied Patagonia to global markets, empires, and wildlife conservation movements. By exposing seams in national territories and global markets knit together by force, this book provides perspectives and analyses vital for understanding contemporary conflicts over mass consumption, the conservation of biodiversity, and struggles for environmental justice in Patagonia and beyond. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this episode, I talk to Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee details environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the region's history by tracing the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of the region. With locusts and moving people at center stage, surprising continuities and ruptures appear in the Jazira, the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Transcending approaches focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the creation of nation states, Dolbee provides a new perspective on the modern Middle East grounded in environmental change, state violence, and popular resistance. Deren Ertas is a PhD Candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Throughout its history, the American West symbolized a place of hope and new beginnings, where anything was possible, especially for men. However, the history written until the 1970s and 1980s excluded women.  In 'Gold Fever' and Women: Transformations in Lives, Health Care and Medicine in the 19th Century American West (Transcript, 2023), Sigrid Schönfelder illustrates how the American West served as a catalytic gold mine for many transformations for women. It draws on the life narratives of three healthcare providers whose devotion within the social reform movements of the long nineteenth century contributed significantly to shaping healthcare policies. Their stories show how women contributed to place-making in the West and served as role models for other women to enter the field of medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Daniel Susskind examines the brief and powerful history of economic growth and puts it into perspective with human prosperity in Growth: A History and a Reckoning (Harvard UP, 2024). Susskind acknowledges the tremendous benefits of economic growth, which he credits with freeing billions of people from poverty and allowing us to live longer and healthier lives. He also recognizes the real and substantial costs of our relentless pursuit of growth at the expense of other considerations and moral challenges.  Responding to the degrowth movement, Susskind counters the assumption that simply reducing growth will lead to better outcomes. In particular, Susskind points out that our key measure of growth, GDP, is one imperfect metric that is neither intended nor effective as a proxy for well-being. He recommends a more balanced "dashboard" approach that includes GDP along with other success measures. Reducing our myopic focus on GDP does not mean less growth. Susskind presents an alternate approach, arguing that we should continue to pursue growth through the creative application of new ideas that allow us to use our finite natural resources more effectively and efficiently.  Ideas, he points out, are not a scarce asset but an infinite one; by shifting to focus on new ways of thinking and working Susskind shows how we can continue to pursue the benefits of growth while mitigating the high costs. Book referenced:  GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle Recommended reading:  Planting the Oudolf Gardens by Rory Dusoir Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century (Duke UP, 2023), Faith Smith engages with a period in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean often overlooked as nondescript, quiet, and embarrassingly pro-imperial within the larger narrative of Jamaican and Trinidadian nationalism. Between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I, British imperialism was taken for granted among both elites and ordinary people, while nationalist discourses would not begin to shape political imagination in the West Indies for decades. Smith argues that this moment, far from being uneventful, disrupts the inevitability of nationhood in the mid-twentieth century and anticipates the Caribbean’s present-day relationship to global power.  Smith assembles and analyzes a diverse set of texts, from Carnival songs, poems, and novels to newspapers, photographs, and gardens, to examine theoretical and literary-historiographic questions concerning time and temporality, empire and diaspora, immigration and indigeneity, gender and the politics of desire, Africa’s place within Caribbeanist discourse, and the idea of the Caribbean itself. Closely examining these cultural expressions of apparent quiescence, Smith locates the quiet violence of colonial rule and the insistence of colonial subjects on making meaningful lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Ben Wright's Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism (LSU Press, 2020) demonstrates how religion structured the possibilities and limitations of American abolitionism during the early years of the republic. From the American Revolution through the eruption of schisms in the three largest Protestant denominations in the 1840s, this comprehensive work lays bare the social and religious divides that culminated in secession and civil war. Historians often emphasize status anxieties, market changes, biracial cooperation, and political maneuvering as primary forces in the evolution of slavery in the United States. Wright instead foregrounds the pivotal role religion played in shaping the ideological contours of the early abolitionist movement. Wright first examines the ideological distinctions between religious conversion and purification in the aftermath of the Revolution, when a small number of white Christians contended that the nation must purify itself from slavery before it could fulfill its religious destiny. Most white Christians disagreed, focusing on visions of spiritual salvation over the practical goal of emancipation. To expand salvation to all, they created new denominations equipped to carry the gospel across the American continent and eventually all over the globe. These denominations established numerous reform organizations, collectively known as the "benevolent empire," to reckon with the problem of slavery. One affiliated group, the American Colonization Society (ACS), worked to end slavery and secure white supremacy by promising salvation for Africa and redemption for the United States. Yet the ACS and its efforts drew strong objections. Proslavery prophets transformed expectations of expanded salvation into a formidable antiabolitionist weapon, framing the ACS's proponents as enemies of national unity. Abolitionist assertions that enslavers could not serve as agents of salvation sapped the most potent force in American nationalism--Christianity--and led to schisms within the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches. These divides exacerbated sectional hostilities and sent the nation farther down the path to secession and war. Wright's provocative analysis reveals that visions of salvation both created and almost destroyed the American nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Between the 1920s and 1980s, the choices that Ghanaian women made regarding their reproductive health were defined by development policy and practice. Spanning the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods, Holly Ashford's book Development and Women's Reproductive Health in Ghana, 1920-1982 (Routledge, 2022) demonstrates that whilst the substance of development discourse shifted over time, principles of development continued to be used to impact and legitimise reproductive health policy and practices well after independence. The book explores Ghana’s pluralist health system, the introduction of maternal and child welfare, the dominance of the Red Cross in Ghana’s maternal and child health landscape, nationalist pronatalism and global population activism. In order to understand how global iterations of development and health policy impacted ordinary lives in Ghana, the author uses evidence from multiple ‘levels,’ including private papers, national archives and records of international and transnational organisations. Providing balanced archival perspectives, the book includes extensive oral history interviews carried out with both rural Ghanaian women and traditional birth attendants, as well as with midwives, doctors and family planning fieldworkers. This book will have an important impact on a number of historical fields including Ghanaian history, global health history, global histories of population and family planning and histories of development. It will be of interest to researchers and students in the history of public health, development, Africa, Ghana and gender. Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational historical perspective. More info here. Twitter: @iheid_history and @GC_IHEID Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Childhood as lived during the French Third Republic was very different from childhood during the modern era. Working-class children laboured alongside adults in the home, on the streets, and in places of work. French authorities sought to change this and redefine childhood by means of government organizations, separate legal structures, and schools for delinquent children. French authorities visited places of work, schools, and interviewed parents. Yet gender based divisions between males and females were still reinforced. Professor Sachs was an assistant professor of history at Texas State University and will start as assistant professor with Texas A & M next year. In her latest publication, An Age to Work: Working Class Childhood in Third Republic Paris (Oxford University Press, 2023), Professor Sachs uses police reports, records of interviews, and postcards to explore the history of working class children in Paris. Dr. Sachs received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2017. Prior to coming to Texas State, she taught at William & Mary and Denison University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Media studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture (Brill, 2023) is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related disciplines reviewing how scholarship has addressed issues of ancient media in the past, assessing the use of media criticism in current research, and outlining potential directions for future discussions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, teachers, administrators, and policymakers fashioned a system of industrial education that attempted to transform Black and Indigenous peoples and land. This form of teaching—what Bayley J. Marquez names plantation pedagogy—was built on the claim that slavery and land dispossession are fundamentally educational. Plantation pedagogy and the formal institutions that encompassed it were thus integrally tied to enslavement, settlement, and their inherent violence toward land and people. Marquez investigates how proponents developed industrial education domestically and then spread the model abroad as part of US imperialism. A deeply thoughtful and arresting work, Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space (U California Press, 2024) sits where Black and Native studies meet in order to understand our interconnected histories and theorize our collective futures. Bayley J. Marquez is an Indigenous scholar from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University. He currently sits on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Friars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late mediaeval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are the people we think of immediately as agents of healing; whilst we identify university teachers as authorities on medical writings. Yet from their first appearance in England in the 1220s to the dispersal of the friaries in the 1530s, four orders of friars were active as healers of every type. Their care extended beyond the circle of their own brethren: patients included royalty, nobles and bishops, and they also provided charitable aid and relief to the poor. They wrote about medicine too. Bartholomew the Englishman and Roger Bacon were arguably the most influential authors, alongside the Dominican Henry Daniel. Nor should we forget the anonymous Franciscan compilers of the Tabula medicine, a handbook of cures, which, amongst other items, contains case histories of friars practising medicine. Even after the Reformation, these texts continued to circulate and find new readers amongst practitioners and householders. The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Peter Murray Jones restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care, exploring the complex, productive entanglement between care of the soul and healing of the body, in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon the surprising wealth of evidence found in the surviving manuscripts, it brings to light individuals such as William Holme (c. 1400), and his patient the duke of York (d. 1402), who suffered from swollen legs. Holme also wrote about medicinal simples and gave instructions for dealing with eye and voice problems experienced by his brother Franciscans. Friars from the thirteenth century onwards wrote their medicine differently, reflecting their religious vocation as preachers and confessors. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Examining how a civilian organization used the Civil War to advance their religious mission. Tabernacles in the Wilderness: The US Christian Commission on the Civil War Battlefront (Kent State UP, 2024) discusses the work of the United States Christian Commission (USCC), a civilian relief agency established by northern evangelical Protestants to minister to Union troops during the American Civil War. USCC workers saw in the Civil War not only a wrathful judgment from God for the sins of the nation but an unparalleled opportunity to save the souls of US citizens and perfect the nation. Thus, the workers set about proselytizing and distributing material aid to Union soldiers with undaunted and righteous zeal. Whether handing out religious literature, leading prayer meetings, preaching sermons, mending uniforms, drawing up tailored diets for sick men, or bearing witness to deathbed scenes, USCC workers improvised and enacted a holistic lived theology that emphasized the link between the body and soul. Making extensive use of previously neglected archival material—most notably the reports, diaries, and correspondence of the volunteer delegates who performed this ministry on the battlefront—Rachel Williams explores the proselytizing methods employed by the USCC, the problems encountered in their application, and the ideological and theological underpinnings of their work. Tabernacles in the Wilderness offers fascinating new insights into the role of civilians within army camps, the bureaucratization and professionalization of philanthropy during the Civil War and in the United States more broadly, and the emotional landscape and material culture of faith and worship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Shahmima Akhtar is a historian of race, migration and empire and an assistant professor of Black and Asian British History at the University of Birmingham. She previously worked at the Royal Historical Society to improve BME representation in UK History, whether working with schools and the curriculum, cultural institutions, community groups or other learned societies. Dr. Akhtar has also worked closely with museums and heritage sites as a researcher and consultant on shaping histories of the British Empire for today’s populace. In this interview, she discusses her new book, Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, Race and Nation, c. 1850-1970 (Manchester UP, 2024), which studies differing visions of Irish racial identities as displayed at various international fairs and expos. Exhibiting Irishness analyses how exhibitions enabled Irish individuals and groups to work out (privately and publicly) their politicised existences across two centuries. As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures. Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building. Exhibiting Irishness demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. The central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland's political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland. Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What exactly is capitalism? How has the meaning of capitalism changed over time? And what’s at stake in our understanding or misunderstanding of it? In Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton UP, 2022), Michael Sonenscher examines the history behind the concept and pieces together the range of subjects bound up with the word. Sonenscher shows that many of our received ideas fail to pick up the work that the idea of capitalism is doing for us, without us even realizing it. “Capitalism” was first coined in France in the early nineteenth century. It began as a fusion of two distinct sets of ideas. The first involved thinking about public debt and war finance. The second involved thinking about the division of labour. Sonenscher shows that thinking about the first has changed radically over time. Funding welfare has been added to funding warfare, bringing many new questions in its wake. Thinking about the second set of ideas has offered far less room for manoeuvre. The division of labour is still the division of labour and the debates and discussions that it once generated have now been largely forgotten. By exploring what lay behind the earlier distinction before it collapsed and was eroded by the passage of time, Sonenscher shows why the present range of received ideas limits our political options and the types of reform we might wish for. Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Sans-Culottes and Before the Deluge (both Princeton UP). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The third edition of Women and the American Experience: A Concise History (Routledge, 2024) is a comprehensive survey of U.S. women’s history from the seventeenth century to the present that illuminates the diversity of women’s experience and underscores the roles that women have played as agents of change. Moving women’s lives from the margins of history into the spotlight, the text draws links between women’s experience and traditional facets of history, such as colonization, industrialization, politics, and war. This new edition grapples with emerging themes and debates in the field. A new chapter covers the Civil War and emancipation. Discussions of current issues include the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on women’s health and work, the #MeToo movement, transgender activism, reproductive rights, and the ERA. Updated suggestions for further reading reinforce evolving trends in women’s history. Used often to shape college curricula and revised to include recent research, this book is designed to serve students, teachers, and general readers concerned with U.S. history and women’s past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Between the mid-19th century and the start of the twentieth century, the Northern Paiute people of the Great Basin went from a self-sufficient tribe well-adapted to living on the harsh desert homelands, to a people singled out by the Native activist Henry Roe Cloud for their dire social and economic position.  The story of how this happened is told in Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country (Bison Books, 2022) by David H. Wilson, Jr. By focusing on the human stories that make up the arc of nineteenth century Paiute history, Wilson argues that many historians have gotten the Paiute story wrong, and that greater attention needs to be paid to Native sources, rather than taking the words of American generals at face value. Through characters like O.O. Howard, Sarah Winnemucca, and James Wilbur, Wilson tells the epic story of adaptability and change, even in the face of great tragedy, that sets the Paiute's apart as a singular part of American Western history.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Every protest movement has been dismissed as a mere ‘mindless mob,’ caught in a psychological frenzy. Where did this idea come from, and why does it last? Gustave Le Bon. This is episode one of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. You can also hear a trailer of next week’s episode, the (ir)Rational Rainbow, on their website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

During the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Laypeople and religious alike learned about their rituals not only through readings from the Vitae Patrum (Lives of the Desert Fathers) and sermons but also through the images that brought their stories to life. In Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Denva Gallant examines the Morgan Library’s richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum (MS M.626), whose extraordinary artworks witness the rise of the eremitic ideal and its impact on the visual culture of late mediaeval Italy. Drawing upon scholarship on the history of psychology, eastern monasticism, gender, and hagiography, Dr. Gallant deepens our understanding of the centrality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to late mediaeval piety. She provides important insights into the role of images in making the practices of the desert saints both compelling and accessible to fourteenth-century city dwellers, who were just beginning to cultivate the habit of private devotion on a wide scale. By focusing on the most extensively illuminated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum to emerge during the trecento, this book sheds new light on the ways in which images communicated and reinforced modes of piety. It will be of interest to art historians, religious historians, and students focusing on this period in Italian history. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In recent years, scholars have rediscovered Hannah Arendt`s "boomerang thesis" – the "coming home" of European colonialism as genocide on European soil – as well as Raphael Lemkin`s work around his definition of genocide and the importance of its colonial dimensions. Germany and other European states are increasingly engaging in debates on comparing the Holocaust to other genocides and cases of mass killing, memorialization, "decolonization" and attempts to come to terms with the past ("Vergangenheitsbewältigung").  Colonial Paradigms of Violence: Comparative Analysis of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Killing (Wallstein, 2022), part of the European Holocaust Studies series, offers a variety of perspectives on the connections and entanglements of colonialism and mass violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends began to meet at the bar of the King David Hotel. This group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals—among them Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sally Kassab, Walid Khalidi, and Rasha Salam, some of whom would go on to become acclaimed authors, scholars, and critics—came together across religious lines in a fleeting moment of possibility within a troubled history. What brought these Muslim, Jewish, and Christian friends together, and what became of them in the aftermath of 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba? Sonja Mejcher-Atassi tells the story of this unlikely friendship and in so doing offers an intimate cultural and social history of Palestine in the critical postwar period. She vividly reconstructs the vanished social world of these protagonists, tracing the connections between the specificity of individual lives and the larger contexts in which they are embedded. In exploring this ecumenical friendship and its artistic, literary, and intellectual legacies, Mejcher-Atassi demonstrates how social biography can provide a picture of the past that is at once more inclusive and more personal. This group portrait, she argues, allows us to glimpse alternative possibilities that exist within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine. Bringing a remarkable era to life through archival research and nuanced interdisciplinary scholarship, An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948 (Columbia UP, 2024) unearths prospects for historical reconciliation, solidarity, and justice. Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Reading Across Modern Arabic Literature and Art (2012), as well as coeditor of The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous: A Critical Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual (2021), Rafa Nasiri: Artist Books (2016), and Archives, Museums, and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Every Tudor Queen had ladies-in-waiting. They were her confidantes and her chaperones. Only the Queen's ladies had the right to enter her most private chambers, spending hours helping her to get dressed and undressed, caring for her clothes and jewels, listening to her secrets. But they also held a unique power. A quiet word behind the scenes, an appropriately timed gift, a well-negotiated marriage alliance were all forms of political agency wielded expertly by women. The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens (W. W. Norton, 2024) by Dr. Nicola Clark explores the daily lives of ladies-in-waiting, revealing the secrets of recruitment, costume, what they ate, where (and with whom) they slept. We meet María de Salinas, who travelled to England with Catherine of Aragon when just a teenager and spied for her during the divorce from Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn's lady-in-waiting Jane Parker was instrumental in the execution of not one, but two queens. And maid-of-honour Anne Basset kept her place through the last four consorts, negotiating the conflicting loyalties of her birth family, her mistress the Queen, and even the desires of the King himself. As Henry changed wives, and changed the very fabric of the country's structure besides, these women had to make choices about loyalty that simply didn't exist before. The Waiting Game is the first time their vital story has been told. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A landmark work that weaves captivating stories about the past, present, and personal into an inspiring vision for how America can educate immigrant students Setting out from her classroom, Jessica Lander takes the reader on a powerful and urgent journey to understand what it takes for immigrant students to become Americans. A compelling read for everyone who cares about America’s future, Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education (Beacon Press, 2022) brims with innovative ideas for educators and policy makers across the country. Lander brings to life the history of America’s efforts to educate immigrants through rich stories. Making Americans is an exploration of immigrant education across the country told through key historical moments, current experiments to improve immigrant education, and profiles of immigrant students. Making Americans is a remarkable book that will reshape how we all think about nurturing one of America’s greatest assets: the newcomers who enrich this country with their energy, talents, and drive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham UP, 2023) examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to document and interpret these events. Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these extinction events also involves examining what happens when the conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life. What Is Extinction? delves into the development of last animal photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and continue to change in the present. Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English and core faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. He is the author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics and co-author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation: Composing Kinship in Colonial Spanish America (University of Virginia, 2023) shows the importance of textual, religious, and bureaucratic ties to struggles over colonial governance and identities. Dr. Matthew Goldmark analyses these ties as forms of kinship forged outside of the well-studied paradigms of sex, biology, and procreation. He demonstrates how colonial actors—Spanish and Indigenous—vied for power when they argued that identity could be shaped by spiritual fatherhood, standardised education, or the regulation of doctrine. Forms of Relation illustrates why we must interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how non-procreative kinships shaped the Spanish colonial regime. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today we are going to explore a fascinating volume of the Yiddish library, the autobiography of Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn. Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity. The memoir is brimming with information; his adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire. Michoel Rotenfeld has translated Goldenshteyn’s autobiography into English and provided an extensive introduction and helpful notes throughout the text. Rotenfeld’s translation, The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea, was published in 2023 by Touro University Press. Michoel Rotenfeld is a historical researcher and the associate director of Touro University Libraries. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Building a Nation at War: Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II (Harvard UP, 2022) argues that the Chinese Nationalist government’s retreat inland during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), its consequent need for inland resources, and its participation in new scientific and technical relationships with the United States led to fundamental changes in how the Nationalists engaged with science and technology as tools to promote development. The war catalyzed an emphasis on applied sciences, comprehensive economic planning, and development of scientific and technical human resources—all of which served the Nationalists’ immediate and long-term goals. It created an opportunity for the Nationalists to extend control over inland China and over education and industry. It also provided opportunities for China to mobilize transnational networks of Chinese-Americans, Chinese in America, and the American government and businesses. These groups provided technical advice, ran training programs, and helped the Nationalists acquire manufactured goods and tools. J. Megan Greene shows how the Nationalists worked these programs to their advantage, even in situations where their American counterparts clearly had the upper hand. Finally, this book shows how, although American advisers and diplomats criticized China for harboring resources rather than putting them into winning the war against Japan, US industrial consultants were also strongly motivated by postwar goals. J. Megan Greene is Professor of History at the University of Kansas. Her field of study is the history of the Republic of China under the KMT both in China and on Taiwan. She is also the author of The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan: Science Policy and the Quest for Modernization (Harvard University Press, 2008), a study of industrial science policy in China and Taiwan under the KMT. Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Casablanca is one of the most celebrated Hollywood films of all time, its iconic romance enshrined in collective memory across generations. Drawing from archival materials, industry trade journals, and cultural commentary, in Immortal Films: "Casablanca" and the Afterlife of a Hollywood Classic (University of California Press, 2022), Dr. Barbara Klinger explores the history of Casablanca's circulation in the United States from the early 1940s to the present by examining its exhibition via radio, repertory houses, television, and video. By resituating the film in the dynamically changing industrial, technological, and cultural circumstances that have defined its journey over eight decades, Dr. Klinger challenges our understanding of its meaning and reputation as both a Hollywood classic and a cult film. Through this single-film survey, Immortal Films proposes a new approach to the study of film history and aesthetics and, more broadly, to cinema itself as a medium in constant interface with other media as a necessary condition of its own public existence and endurance. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Simon Heffer's book Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars (Penguin, 2024) is an astonishingly ambitious overview of the political, social and cultural history of the country from 1919 to 1939. It explores and explains the politics of the period, and puts such moments of national turmoil as the General Strike of 1926 and the Abdication Crisis of 1936 under the microscope. It offers pen portraits of the era's most significant figures. It traces the changing face of Britain as cars made their first mass appearance, the suburbs sprawled, and radio and cinema became the means of mass entertainment. And it probes the deep divisions that split the nation: between the haves and have-nots, between warring ideological factions, and between those who promoted accommodation with fascism in Europe and those who bitterly opposed it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Tribe-Class Linkages: The History and Politics of the Agrarian Movement in Tripura (Routledge, 2023) is a historical study of the development of agrarian class relations among the tribal population in Tripura. Tracing the evolution of Tripura and its agrarian relations from monarchy in the nineteenth century to democracy in the twentieth century, the book discusses the nature of the erstwhile princely state of Tripura, analyses the emergence of differentiation within tribes, and documents the emergence of the tribal movement in the state. It specifically focuses on the tribal movement led by the Ganamukti Parishad, beginning with the historic revolt of 1948-51 against state repression of the tribal people, followed by the mass movements in the 1950s and 1960s, which were founded on a recognition of class relations and the slogan of unity across the tribal and non-tribal (Bengali) peasantry. The first of its kind, the book will be indispensable for students and researchers of tribal studies, agrarian studies, exclusion studies, tribe-class relationships, minority studies, sociology, development studies, history, political science, north-east India studies, and South Asian studies. It will also be useful for activists and policymakers working in the area. Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Placing the Frontier in British North-East India: Law, Custom, and Knowledge (Oxford UP, 2023) is a study of the travels of colonial law into the North-East frontier of the British Empire in India. Focusing on the nineteenth century, it examines the relationship of law and space, and indigenous place-making. Inhabitants of the frontier hills examined in this book were not defined as British subjects, yet they were incorporated within the colonial legal framework. The work examines the nature of this legal limbo that produced both the hills and their inhabitants as interruptions but equally as integral to the imperial project. Through a study of place-making by indigenous inhabitants of the frontier, it further demonstrates the heterogeneous narratives of self and belonging found in sites of orality and kinship that shape the hills in the present day. The book contributes to the historiography of law in colonial South Asia. It focuses on an understudied region that reveals intricacies of colonial law that are crucial for an analysis of forms of governance of marginalized communities throughout India. The breadth of literary and non-literary sources used in the book allows for the juxtaposition of local reproductions of the past and histories of belonging that defy binary notions of history and memory, myth and reality, and physical and imaginative space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today I talked to Peter Hill about his new book Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East (Oneworld Academic, 2024). In 1813, high in the Lebanese mountains, a thirteen-year-old boy watches a solar eclipse. Will it foretell a war, a plague, the death of a prince? Mikha’il Mishaqa’s lifelong search for truth starts here. Soon he’s reading Newtonian science and the radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: he loses his religion, turning away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, as civil war rages in Syria, he finds a new faith – Evangelical Protestantism. His obstinate polemics scandalise his community. Then, in 1860, Mishaqa barely escapes death in the most notorious event in Damascus: a massacre of several thousand Christians. We are presented with a paradox: rational secularism and violent religious sectarianism grew up together. By tracing Mishaqa’s life through this tumultuous era, when empires jostled for control, Peter Hill answers the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe? It’s a world where one man could be a Jew, an Orthodox Christian and a Sunni Muslim in turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta. Peter Hill is a historian of the modern Middle East, specialising in the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. His research focusses on political thought and practice, the politics of religion, and translation and intercultural exchanges. He also has a strong interest in comparative and global history. Before joining Northumbria University in 2019, Peter was Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford. He has taught and designed modules in the history of the Middle East and global history, and the history of capitalism. In 2023 he was the winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History. Peter's first book, Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He has published several articles on translation, political thought and popular politics in the Middle East, in journals such as Past & Present, the Journal of Arabic Literature, and Journal of Global History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A political history of the rise and fall of American debt relief. Americans have a long history with debt. They also have a long history of mobilizing for debt relief. Throughout the nineteenth century, indebted citizens demanded government protection from their financial burdens, challenging readings of the Constitution that exalted property rights at the expense of the vulnerable. Their appeals shaped the country’s periodic experiments with state debt relief and federal bankruptcy law, constituting a pre-industrial safety net. Yet, the twentieth century saw the erosion of debtor politics and the eventual retrenchment of bankruptcy protections. The Political Development of American Debt Relief (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces how geographic, sectoral, and racial politics shaped debtor activism over time, enhancing our understanding of state-building, constitutionalism, and social policy. Emily Zackin is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book was Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America’s Positive Rights (Princeton UP, 2013). Chloe Thurston is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. Her first book was  At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination and the American State (Cambridge UP, 2018). Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first book was America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge UP, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Shuchi Kapila, Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) Dr. Shuchi Kapila, Professor of English at Grinnell College, has a new book that explores the India/Pakistan Partition in 1947 through the lens of memory, generational conversation and inheritance. Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember is most clearly focused on this idea of how we learn to remember the past, particularly the complexities of a past that includes trauma and violence along with independence and hope. This book, part of the Palgrave MacMillan series on Memory Studies, examines these ideas of memory and nostalgia and how they have shaped the cultural and political understanding of Partition in India, but also in the diaspora. Kapila starts with her own lived experiences, recalling bits of stories her mother told of her life before Partition. This is the path that Postmemory and the Partition of India continues along, as Kapila notes that the memories of Partition are fragmented, are communicated in bits, often in a non-linear way. Thus, the memories themselves were not fully communicated to the children of those who experienced Partition, and this generation of children, now adults, are reflecting on their own inheritance from Partition, even though they themselves did not live through it. Part of the focus in Learning to Remember is drawing out this approach to remembering—what is it that the traumatized generation passed along, even unknowingly, to their children. The transfer of more than 12 million people without much planning or organization, in context of the British removal of colonial power from the Asian subcontinent, and the establishment of independent India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, were all jarring events, leaving individuals stateless, or newly engulfed in nation-states that had not previously existed. Families were separated, women were abducted, violence and displacement all dominated this period—and for those who lived through it, it was not necessarily contextualized by a state power committing crimes against particular populations, as was the case in the Holocaust, or the Apartheid regime in South Africa, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Thus, the responses that happened in regard to these events, with the Nuremburg Trials, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, did not happen in the same way in terms of Partition. Kapila explores different avenues that have been developing to rectify some of this missing memory of Partition. She does interviews with those who experienced Partition and she also interviews her generational contemporaries, examining how different generations have essentially experienced Partition and also how they have learned to remember this assaultive experience that is also the foundation of independent nation-states. This is the thrust of the first half of the book—these intergenerational conversations and understandings of Partition. The second half of the book looks more closely at the two physical spaces that have been established to communicate about Partition. These two physical spaces include the Berkeley, California 1947 Partition Archive, which now contains at least 10,000 oral histories of Partition, available for researchers, scholars, and individuals to explore and examine. India has also recently opened the Partition Museum, Amritsar, the first museum of its kind in India. Museums tend to craft particular narratives of events or experiences, and Kapila considers this new museum, and how it is participating in that narrative design, while also engaging with critiques and analysis of the newly established museum, which opened in 2017. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History: Ten Design Principles (Duke UP, 2024) is a guide for college and high school educators who are teaching Indian Ocean histories for the first time or who want to reinvigorate their courses. It can also serve those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi as well as those who want to incorporate Indian Ocean histories into their world history courses. Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow offer course design principles that will help students navigate topics ranging from empire, geography, slavery, and trade to mobility, disease, and the environment. In addition to exploring non-European sources and diverse historical methodologies, they discuss classroom pedagogy and provide curriculum possibilities that will help instructors at any level enrich and deepen standard approaches to world history. Alpers and McDow draw readers into strategically designing courses that will challenge students to think critically about a vast area with which many of them are almost entirely unfamiliar. Edward A. Alpers is an Emeritus Research Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford University Press, 2014). Thomas F. McDow is an Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University and the author of Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2018). Scott Thomas Erich is the Howell Postdoctoral Research Associate in Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. His current book project is Taming the Sea: Southeastern Arabia's Extractive Seascape c. 1820-present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In our interview, I spoke with Donald Stoker about the changes in American grand strategy over the past 250 years and the major themes from his new book: Purpose and Power: US Grand Strategy from the Revolutionary Era to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024). Across the full span of the nation’s history, Stoker challenges our understanding of the purposes and uses of American power. From the struggle for independence to the era of renewed competition with China and Russia, he reveals the grand strategies underpinning the nation’s pursuit of sovereignty, security, expansion, and democracy abroad. He shows how successive administrations have projected diplomatic, military, and economic power, and mobilized ideas and information to preserve American freedoms at home and secure US aims abroad. He exposes the myth of American isolationism, the good and ill of America’s quest for democracy overseas, and how too often its administrations have lacked clear political aims or a concrete vision for where they want to go. Understanding this history is vital if America is to relearn how to use its power to meet the challenges ahead and to think more clearly about political aims and grand strategy. The interview reflects the opinions of the author and not that of the US government or National Defense University. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Trish Kahle, Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University-Qatar, about Kahle's new project, "Power Up: A Social History of American Electricity," which focuses especially on the labor history of both constructing and maintaining the electricity grid. They also talk about Kahle's forthcoming book, Energy Citizenship: Coal and Democracy in the American Century (Columbia UP, 2024), which "traces how modern U.S. social citizenship has been shaped by coal miners and the fuel they extracted." The pair also discuss the emerging field of the "energy humanities" and what it means to take a labor-centered approach to energy history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration.  Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today. Matthijs Lok, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Universiteit van Amsterdam Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) by Dr. Paula S. De Vos examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City’s Herrera pharmacy—natural substances with known healing powers that formed part of the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. Dr. De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition from its foundations in ancient Greece to the physician-philosophers of mediaeval Islamic empires and the Latin West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering a global history of the transmission of these materials, knowledges, and techniques. Her detailed inventory of the Herrera pharmacy reveals the many layers of this tradition and how it developed over centuries, providing new perspectives and insight into the development of Western science and medicine: its varied origins, its engagement with and inclusion of multiple knowledge traditions, the ways in which these traditions moved and circulated in relation to imperialism, and its long-term continuities and dramatic transformations. Dr. De Vos ultimately reveals the great significance of pharmacy, and of artisanal pursuits more generally, as a cornerstone of ancient, mediaeval, and early modern epistemologies and philosophies of nature. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Why did England's one experiment in republican rule fail? Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658 sparked a period of unrivalled turmoil and confusion in English history. In less than two years, there were close to ten changes of government; rival armies of Englishmen faced each other across the Scottish border; and the Long Parliament was finally dissolved after two decades. Why was this period so turbulent, and why did the republic, backed by a formidable standing army, come crashing down in such spectacular fashion? In The Fall: The Last Days of the English Republic (Yale UP, 2024), Henry Reece explores the full story of the English republic's downfall. Questioning the accepted version of events, Reece argues that the restoration of the monarchy was far from inevitable--and that the republican regime could have survived long term. Richard Cromwell's Protectorate had deep roots in the political nation, the Rump Parliament mobilised its supporters impressively, and the country showed little interest in returning to the old order until the republic had collapsed. This is a compelling account that transforms our understanding of England's short-lived period of republican rule. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Stories are woven into the fabric of our most personal garments. From the first loincloths to the intricate layers of shapewear, the concealed world of underwear is capable of expressing individual desire and also aspects of society at large. An indicator of the vagaries of fashion, underwear can be simple or elaborate. It both safeguards and exposes, reflecting our hopes and experiences. Underwear can embarrass and excite, amuse and shame us. The Virtues of Underwear: Modesty, Flamboyance, and Filth (Reaktion, 2024) by Nina Edwards illuminates the sometimes profound significance of the garments we wear beneath our outer clothing. It discusses the history of both women’s and men’s underwear, and global cultures of dress. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Los Angeles shoreline is one of the most iconic natural landscapes in the United States, if not the world. The vast shores of Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu are familiar sights to film and television audiences, conveying images of pristine sand, carefree fun, and glamorous physiques. Yet, in the early twentieth century Angelenos routinely lamented the city's crowded, polluted, and eroded sands, many of which were private and thus inaccessible to the public. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, LA's engineers, city officials, urban planners, and business elite worked together to transform the relatively untouched beaches into modern playgrounds for the white middle class. They cleaned up and enlarged the beaches--up to three times their original size--and destroyed old piers and barracks to make room for brand-new accommodations, parking lots, and freeways. The members of this powerful "beach lobby" reinvented the beach experience for the suburban age, effectively preventing a much-feared "white flight" from the coast. In doing so, they established Southern California as the national reference point for shoreline planning and coastal access. As they opened up vast public spaces for many Angelenos to express themselves, show off their bodies, and forge alternative communities, they made clear that certain groups of beachgoers, including African Americans, gay men and women, and bodybuilders, were no longer welcome. Despite their artificial origins, LA's beaches have proved remarkably resilient. The drastic human interventions into nature brought social and economic benefits to the region without long-term detrimental consequences on the environment. Yet the ongoing climate crisis and rapid sea level rise will eventually force the city to reckon with its past building. Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Oxford UP, 2024) not only uncovers how the Los Angeles coastline was constructed but also how this major planning and engineering project affected the lives of ordinary city-dwellers and attracted many Americans to move to Southern California. Featuring a foreword by Jenny Price, it recounts the formidable beach modernization campaign that transformed Los Angeles into one of the world's greatest coastal metropolises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores the significant contributions of African American women radical activists from 1955 to 1995. It examines the 1961 case of African American working-class self-defense advocate Mae Mallory, who traveled from New York to Monroe, North Carolina, to provide support and weapons to the Negroes with Guns Movement. Accused of kidnapping a Ku Klux Klan couple, she spent thirteen months in a Cleveland jail, facing extradition. African American women radical activists Ethel Azalea Johnson of Negroes with Guns, Audrey Proctor Seniors of the banned New Orleans NAACP, the Trotskyist Workers World Party, Ruthie Stone, and Clarence Henry Seniors of Workers World founded the Monroe Defense Committee to support Mallory. Mae’s daughter, Pat, aged sixteen also participated, and they all bonded as family. When the case ended, they joined the Tanzanian, Grenadian, and Nicaraguan World Revolutions. Using her unique vantage point as Audrey Proctor Seniors’s daughter, Paula Marie Seniors blends personal accounts with theoretical frameworks of organic intellectual, community feminism, and several other theoretical frameworks in analyzing African American radical women’s activism in this era. Essential biographical and character narratives are combined with an analysis of the social and political movements of the era and their historical significance. Seniors examines the link between Mallory, Johnson, and Proctor Seniors’s radical activism and their connections to national and international leftist human rights movements and organizations. She asks the underlying question: Why did these women choose radical activism and align themselves with revolutionary governments, linking Black human rights to world revolutions? Seniors’s historical and personal account of the era aims to recover Black women radical activists’ place in history. Her innovative research and compelling storytelling broaden our knowledge of these activists and their political movements. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market. Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Oscar Sanchez-Sibony reveals the origins of our current era in the dissolution of the institutions that governed the architecture of energy and finance during the Bretton Woods era. He shows how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union sought to dismantle the compartmentalized nature of Bretton Woods in order to escape its material ostracism and pave a path to global finance and exchange that the United States had vetoed during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the construction of a set of pipelines that helped Europe's energy regime change from coal to oil and gas, the Soviet Union succeeded in developing market relations and a relationship with Western capital as durable as the pipelines themselves. He shows how a history of the development of capitalism needs to integrate the socialist world in bringing about the new form of capitalism that regiments our lives today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton, where he has taught since 1975. He is an historian of early modern Europe, and the author and co-author of over a dozen books, including The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997), and Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2020). In November 2006 he spoke to the Institute about Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Harvard University Press, 2006), which he co-wrote with Megan Hale Williams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From the 1960s through the 1990s, the most common job for women in the United States was clerical work. Even as college-educated women obtained greater opportunities for career advancement, occupational segregation by gender remained entrenched. How did feminism in corporate America come to represent the individual success of the executive woman and not the collective success of the secretary? Allison Elias argues that feminist goals of advancing equal opportunity and promoting meritocracy unintentionally undercut the status and prospects of so-called "pink-collar" workers. In the 1960s, ideas about sex equality spurred some clerical workers to organize, demanding "raises and respect," while others pushed for professionalization through credentialing. This cross-class alliance pushed a feminist agenda that included unionizing some clerical workers and advancing others who had college degrees into management. But these efforts diverged in the 1980s, when corporations adopted measures to move qualified women into their upper ranks. By the 1990s, corporate support for professional women resulted in an individualistic feminism that focused on the needs of those at the top. Meanwhile, as many white, college-educated women advanced up the corporate ladder, clerical work became a job for lower-socioeconomic-status women of all races. The Rise of Corporate Feminism: Women in the American Office, 1960-1990 (Columbia UP, 2022) considers changes in the workplace surrounding affirmative action, human resource management, automation, and unionization by groups such as 9to5. At the intersection of history, gender, and management studies, this book spotlights the secretaries, clerks, receptionists, typists, and bookkeepers whose career trajectories remained remarkably similar despite sweeping social and legal change. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

How can the novel be a way to understand the development of nation-state borders? An important work in the intersections of law, literature, history, and migration, Stephanie DeGooyer's Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) offers fascinating insight into understanding naturalization. Tracing the idea of naturalization as it can be understood as a legal fiction and through literary fiction, DeGooyer offers a compelling approach to understanding naturalization as a generative mechanism for national expansion. Through a careful and engaging analysis that spans from Mary Shelley to court proceedings, De Gooyer's Before Borders is a compelling read that will be of great interest for those interested in histories of migration, creative approaches to studying the state, and ways to approach law through and alongside literature. Stephanie DeGooyer is Assistant Professor and Frank Borden and Barbara Lasater Hanes Fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. Her research focuses on the intersections between law and literature. Rine Vieth is an incoming FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. Interested in how people experience state legal regimes, their research centres around questions of law, migration, gender, and religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Women across the Caribbean have been writing, reading, and exchanging cookbooks since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. These cookbooks are about much more than cooking. Through cookbooks, Caribbean women, and a few men, have shaped, embedded, and contested colonial and domestic orders, delineated the contours of independent national cultures, and transformed tastes for independence into flavours of domestic autonomy. Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence (Rutgers University Press, 2024) by Dr. Keja Valens integrates new documents into the Caribbean archive and presents them in a rare pan-Caribbean perspective. The first book-length consideration of Caribbean cookbooks, Culinary Colonialism joins a growing body of work in Caribbean studies and food studies that considers the intersections of food writing, race, class, gender, and nationality. A selection of recipes, culled from the archive that Culinary Colonialism assembles, allows readers to savour the confluence of culinary traditions and local specifications that connect and distinguish national cuisines in the Caribbean. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In early modern Japan, upper status groups coveted pills and powders made of exotic foreign ingredients such as mummy and rhinoceros horn. By the early twentieth century, over-the-counter-patent medicines, and, more alarmingly, morphine, had become mass commodities, fueling debates over opiates in Japan's expanding imperial territories. The fall of the empire and the occupation of Japan by the United States created conditions favorable for heroin use, followed, in time, by glue sniffing and psychedelic mushroom ingestion. By illuminating the neglected history of drugs, Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan (Brill, 2023) highlights both the transnational embeddedness and national peculiarities of the "politics of consumption" in Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke UP, 2024) Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, Angus focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how the mining of bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements is a precondition of photography. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, she illustrates histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to expose the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism.  This conversation discusses the meta-narrative and performative aspects of some of the photographs shown in the text, dives into some of the stories and examples from Ann Atkin's cyanotypes of the 1800s to Warren Cariou's contemporary bitumin prints, and asks what ethical photography looks like given the resource extraction required.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Plato is a philosophical writer of unusual and ingenious versatility. His works engage in argument but are also full of allegory, imagery, myth, paradox and intertextuality. He astutely characterises the participants whom he portrays in conversation. Sometimes he composes fictive dialogues in dramatic form while at other times he does so as narratives.  In How Plato Writes: Perspectives and Problems (Cambridge UP, 2023), world-renowned scholar Malcolm Schofield illustrates the variety of the literary resources that Plato deploys to achieve his philosophical purposes. He draws key passages for discussion particularly, but not only, from Republic and the less well-known Laws and also shows how reconstructing the original historical context of a dialogue and of its assumed readership is essential to understanding Plato's approach. The book will open the eyes of readers of all levels of expertise to Plato's masterly ability as a writer and how an understanding of this is crucial if we are to appreciate his philosophy. Malcolm Schofield is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge University Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilising their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics and honourable citizens, claiming more rights in the public sphere through their spatial practices and in discourses of self-representation. Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic: Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620-1672 (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) by Dr. Genji Yasuhira explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the mediaeval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Threat of Chemical Warfare in World War II (Cornell UP, 2023), M. Girard Dorsey uncovers just how close Britain, the United States, and Canada came to crossing the red line that restrained poison gas during World War II. Unlike in World War I, belligerents did not release poison gas regularly during the Second World War. Yet, the looming threat of chemical warfare significantly affected the actions and attitudes of these three nations as they prepared their populations for war, mediated their diplomatic and military alliances, and attempted to defend their national identities and sovereignty. The story of chemical weapons and World War II begins in the interwar period as politicians and citizens alike advocated to ban, to resist, and eventually to prepare for gas use in the next war. Molly Dorsey reveals, through extensive research in multinational archives and historical literature, that although poison gas was rarely released on the battlefield in World War II, experts as well as lay people dedicated significant time and energy to the weapon's potential use; they did not view chemical warfare as obsolete or taboo. Poison gas was an influential weapon in World War II, even if not deployed in a traditional way, and arms control, for various reasons, worked. Thus, what did not happen is just as important as what did. Holding Their Breath provides insight into these potentialities by untangling World War II diplomacy and chemical weapons use in a new way. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

How have women resisted sexism in TV? In Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation (U California Press, 2024), Jennifer S. Clark, an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, explores the people, organisations, TV shows and audiences who all shaped women in and on television during the 1970s. Drawing on a production studies perspective, the book ranges widely from organisational archives, through key programmes and personalities, to specific genres including sport on TV. The analysis also offers a challenge to both contemporary television’s approach to equity and diversity issues, as well as a significant contribution to the history of television too. The book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in television. The book is also available open access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this sweeping new history, esteemed University of North Carolina historian Kathleen DuVal makes the case for the ongoing, ancient, and dynamic history of Native nationhood as a critical component of global history. In Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024), DuVal covers a thousand years of continental history, building on a new generation of scholars who have argued for the continued power and agency of Native people in the face of challenges, obstacles, and catastrophes. DuVal's history begins long before any European knew of continents across the Atlantic Ocean, and tracks the history of Native nationhood as an idea and practice up through the present day. Incorporating the use of of environmental history, global history, archaeology and oral history, among other diverse methods, DuVal presents a rich and complex history of a continent that has a history dating back far longer than many people might assume, and tells a story that, rather than a simple narrative of decline and conquest, is more intereseting and far more complex. It is impossible to come away from this book without believing that the story of Native nationhood is indeed, the story of North America itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Widespread anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the rebirth of Polish statehood out of World War I and Polish-Soviet War. In Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2018), William W. Hagen offers the pogroms' first scholarly account, revealing how they served as brutal stagings by ordinary people of scenarios dramatizing popular anti-Jewish fears and resentments. While scholarship on modern anti-Semitism has stressed its ideological inspiration ('print anti-Semitism'), this study shows that anti-Jewish violence by perpetrators among civilians and soldiers expressed magic-infused anxieties and longings for redemption from present threats and suffering ('folk anti-Semitism'). Illustrated with contemporary photographs and constructed from extensive, newly discovered archival sources from three continents, this is an innovative work in east European history.  Using extensive first-person testimonies, it reveals gaps - but also correspondences - between popular attitudes and those of the political elite. The pogroms raged against the conscious will of new Poland's governors whilst Christians high and low sometimes sought, even successfully, to block them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate (McFarland, 2022), readers will find a case-study comparison of the emancipation of Russian serfs on the Yazykovo Selo estate and American slaves at the Palmyra Plantation. Although state policies and reactions may not follow the same paths in each area, there were striking thematic parallels. These findings add to our understanding of what happens throughout an emancipation process in which the state grants freedom, and therefore speaks to the universality of the human experience.  Despite the political and economic differences between the two countries, as well as their geographic and cultural distances, this book re-conceptualizes emancipation and its aftermath in each country: from a history that treats each as a separate, self-contained story to one with a unified, global framework. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

For a brief moment in the history of Acre, there was a Hebrew community that linked old and new settlements. It had a national-Zionist orientation and consisted of Jews of local and Mizrachic origin. This community is no longer visible in the cityscape, and its history has disappeared from the collective Zionist memory - but it played a role in building the Jewish national community in Palestine. The unusual history of Acre shows how it succeeded in attracting new, nationalist settlers. Anat Kidron and Shuli Linder Yarkony's book The Jewish Community of Acre in Mandatory Palestine: The Story of a Forgotten Community (de Gruyter, 2024) seeks to illuminate the complexity and diversity of the Zionist enterprise in relation to the Arab and mixed towns of Mandatory Palestine by raising questions about the relationship between the "history of a place" and "national history." By describing the failure of the Hebrew settlement in the Mandate territory of Acre, the book views the Zionist project as a fascinating intersection between the dreams of those who created the leading narratives and between local interests and the unique geographical conditions of the region. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Harry McCarthy provides a new approach to the study of early modern boy actors, offering a historical re-appraisal of these performers' physical skills in order to reassess their wide-reaching contribution to early modern theatrical culture. Ranging across drama performed from the 1580s to the 1630s by all-boy and adult companies alike, the book argues that the exuberant physicality fostered in boy performers across the early modern repertory shaped not only their own performances, but how and why plays were written for them in the first place. Dr. McCarthy's ground-breaking approach to boy performance draws on detailed analysis of a wide range of plays, thorough interrogation of the cultural contexts in which they were written and performed, and present-day practice-based research, offering a critical reimagining of this important and unique facet of early modern theatrical culture. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Scholars working in archaeology, education, history, geography, and politics tell a nuanced story about the people and dynamics that reshaped this region and determined who would control it. The Ohio Valley possesses some of the most resource-rich terrain in the world. Its settlement by humans was thus consequential not only for shaping the geographic and cultural landscape of the region but also for forming the United States and the future of world history. Settling Ohio begins with an overview of the first people who inhabited the region, who built civilizations that moved massive amounts of earth and left an archaeological record that drew the interest of subsequent settlers and continues to intrigue scholars. It highlights how, in the eighteenth century, Native Americans who migrated from the East and North interacted with Europeans to develop impressive trading networks and how they navigated complicated wars and sought to preserve national identities in the face of violent attempts to remove them from their lands.  Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond (Ohio UP, 2023) situates the traditional story of Ohio settlement, including the Northwest Ordinance, the dealings of the Ohio Company of Associates, and early road building, into a far richer story of contested spaces, competing visions of nationhood, and complicated relations with Indian peoples. By so doing, the contributors provide valuable new insights into how chaotic and contingent early national politics and frontier development truly were. Chapters highlighting the role of apple-growing culture, education, African American settlers, and the diverse migration flows into Ohio from the East and Europe further demonstrate the complex multiethnic composition of Ohio’s early settlements and the tensions that resulted. A final theme of this volume is the desirability of working to recover the often-forgotten history of non-White peoples displaced by the processes of settler colonialism that has been, until recently, undervalued in the scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933 (Cambridge UP, 2023) is the first substantive investigation into one of the key sources of radicalism in modern German, the subculture that arose at the intersection of secularism and socialism in the late nineteenth-century. It explores the organizations that promoted their humanistic-monistic worldview through popular science and asks how this worldview shaped the biographies of ambitious self-educated workers and early feminists. Todd H. Weir shows how generations of secularist intellectuals staked out leading positions in the Social Democratic Party, but often lost them due to their penchant for dissent.  Moving between local and national developments, this book examines the crucial role of red secularism in the political struggles over religion that rocked Germany and fed into the National Socialist dictatorship of 1933. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the early modern era, seemingly impossible stories of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft were common and believable. The important question of the time was not if these things happened, but why. This was particularly true as the rise of Protestantism began to challenge Catholic beliefs in miracles and continued to be the case even after scientific research began to supplant religious belief in these phenomena.  In They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale UP, 2023), Carlos Eire shows how these events were an accepted component of early modern life. Based on firsthand accounts, Eire explores the stories of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and others, to describe a world animated by a different understanding of the natural and supernatural. Eire examines why and how cultural, historical, religious, and scientific contexts plays a role in defining both the possible and the impossible. Recommended reading:  Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred &  How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else  both by Jeffrey J. Kripal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Did Woodrow Wilson's daddy issues cause World War II? And what might this teach us about our contemporary political plight? Jordan Osserman talks with psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster and historian Patrick Weil about The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard UP, 2023). While conducting research at Yale, Patrick Weil chanced upon the unpublished and unredacted original manuscript of Sigmund Freud and Ambassador William Bullit's notorious psychobiography of former US President Woodrow Wilson - sat in an unlabelled dusty box. Weil's investigation of this incredible and poorly understood Freud-Bullit collaboration led him to radically reconsider Woodrow Wilson's role in the Treaty of Versailles, and the value of psychoanalysis in illuminating a self-sabotage of world historical proportions.  Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She is the author of the forthcoming On Breathing (Peninsula, 2025), Disorganisation & Sex (Divided, 2022), The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and Conversion Disorder (Columbia University Press, 2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Pantheon, 2013). She contributes regularly to Artforum, The New York Times and the New York Review of Books. Patrick Weil is a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. Professor Weil's work focuses on comparative immigration, citizenship, and church-state law and policy. His most recent books are The Madman in the White House. Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard University Press, 2023) and De La Laïcité en France (Grasset, 2021). Weil is also, since 2006, the founder and the chairman of the NGO Libraries Without Borders (Bibliothèques Sans Frontières). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008 (Cambridge UP, 2023) explores the rise of the professional middle class across the Anglophone world from c. 1870 to 2008. With a focus on British settler colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States - Hannah Forsyth argues that the British middle class structured old forms of virtue into rapidly expanding white-collar professional work, needed to drive both economic and civilizational expansion across their settler colonies. They invested that virtue to produce social and economic profit. This virtue became embedded in the networked Anglophone economy so that, by the mid twentieth century, the professional class ruled the world in alliance with managers whose resources enabled the implementation of virtuous strategies. Since morality and capital had become materially entangled, the 1970s economic crisis also presented a moral crisis for all professions, beginning a process whereby the interests of expert and managerial workers separated and began to actively compete. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this second edition of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (University of Texas Press, 2021) Dr. John Soluri presents a lively, interdisciplinary study that integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States. Beginning in the 1870s, when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Dr. Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalisation and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Pivoting from studies that emphasize the dominance of progressivism on American college campuses during the late sixties and early seventies, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd positions conservative critiques of, and agendas in, American colleges and universities as an essential dimension of a broader conversation of conservative backlash against liberal education. This book explores the story of how stakeholders in American higher education organized and reacted to challenges to their power from the New Left and Black Power student resistance movements of the late 1960s. By examining the range of conservative student organizations and coalition building, Shepherd shows how wealthy donors and conservative intellectuals trained future GOP leaders such as Karl Rove, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, Pat Buchanan, and others in conservative politics, providing them with tactics to consciously drive American politics and culture further to the authoritarian right and to "reclaim" American higher education. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is instructor of higher education at the University of New Orleans. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this interview, he discusses his new book The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting (Cork UP, 2023), a collection of interconnected essays on different aspects of agrarian agitation in 1870s and 1880s Ireland. The Land War in Ireland addresses perceived lacunae in the historiography of the Land War in late nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly deficiencies or omissions relating to the themes of the title: famine, humanitarianism, and the activities of agrarian secret societies, commonly referred to as Moonlighting. The famine that afflicted the country in 1879–80, one generation removed from the catastrophic Great Famine of the 1840s, prompted different social responses. The wealthier sectors of society, their consciousness and humanitarianism awakened, provided the bulk of the financial and administrative support for the famine-stricken peasantry. Others, drawn from the same broad social stratum as the latter, vented their anger and frustration on the government and the landlords, whom they blamed for the crisis. The concern of marginal men and women for the welfare of their less fortunate brethren was not so much the antithesis of altruism, as a different, more rudimentary way of expressing it.The volume’s opening chapter introduces the famine that tormented Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard counties in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The four chapters that follow develop the famine theme, concentrating on the role of civic and religious relief agencies, and the local and international humanitarian response to appeals for assistance. The 1879–80 famine kindled benevolence among the diasporic Irish and the charitable worldwide, but it also provoked a more primal reaction, and the book’s two closing chapters are devoted to the activities of secret societies. The first features the incongruously named Royal Irish Republic, a neo-Fenian combination in north-west County Cork. The volume’s concluding essay links history and literature, positing a connection between agrarian secret society activity during the Land War years and the Kerry playwright George Fitzmaurice’s neglected 1914 drama The Moonlighter. This original and engaging work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of modern Irish history and literature. Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Lessons of history are often referred to in public discourse, but seldom in scholarly discussions. Klas-Göran Karlsson's book Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events (Academic Studies Press, 2024) seeks to change this by introducing an innovative scholarly, analytical model of historical lessons, starting from the basic three-fold perspective that you simultaneously are history, share history, and make history. Not any history is useful for extracting or using lessons. Here, what are denoted as borderline historical events, demonstrating both time-specific and time-transcending qualities, are suggested as useful materials. Scholarly works on the Holocaust and Soviet terror, from Raul Hilberg's and Robert Conquest's classic works of the 1960s to more recent books by Jan Gross and Timothy Snyder, are analyzed to identify lessons of history, and their change during a full half-century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Henry George’s Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as diverse as Sun Yat-sen, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Herzl. Yet, in the 21st century, George is often reduced to a footnote in the history of the Gilded Age. In Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Christopher William England uncovers the influence of Georgism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the movement’s contributions to American liberalism. In surveying George’s devotees and their impacts at the municipal and national levels, England demonstrates that George’s ideas were pivotal in reconciling liberalism to a democratic welfare state. In this episode, we discuss George’s land value tax, domestic and international Georgist movements, and the influence of Progress and Poverty on American and British liberalism. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) is an MPhil student in Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Dr. Lydia Walker's deeply researched and carefully narrated debut monograph, States-in-Waiting: A Counter Narrative of Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2024) traces “the un-endings of decolonization” – the messy and improvised ways in which the 20th-century state-centric international order replaced empire as the default mode of political organization. States-in-Waiting zooms in on the postwar Naga national liberation movement which failed to achieve independence from India at a time when dozens of European colonial possessions secured statehood. The work illuminates the complicated issue of self-determination for minority peoples within new postcolonial states and highlights transcontinental networks of Asian, African, American, and European activists and insurgents who pushed against legal-political constraints of an emergent postimperial world order. Finally, the author recovers riveting “hidden dramas” of decolonization by amplifying the voices of marginalized historical actors, lost non-state archives, and understudied regions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Dr. Lydia Walker is the Assistant Professor and Myers Chair in Global Military History at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today I talked to Benjamin Breen about his book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central, 2024). The generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. At the centre of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists - and star-crossed lovers - Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life's mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists and the founders of the Information Age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Ideas influence people. In particular, extremely well-developed sets of ideas shape individuals, groups, and societies in far-reaching ways. In Revolution and Witchcraft: The Code of Ideology in Unsettled Times (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Gordon Chang establishes these “idea systems” as an academic concept. Through three intense episodes of manipulation and mayhem connected to idea systems—Europe’s witch hunts, the Mao Zedong-era “revolutions,” and the early campaign of the U.S. War on Terror—Revolution and Witchcraft charts the cognitive and informational matrices that seize control of people’s mentalities and behaviors across societies. Through these, the author reaches two conclusions. The first, that we are all vulnerable to the dominating influence of our own matrices of ideas and to those woven by others in the social system. The second, that even the most masterful manipulators of idea programs may lose control of the outcomes of programmatic manipulation. Amongst this analysis, sixty-plus central conceptual terms are provided for readers to analyze multiform idea systems that exist across space, time, and cultural contexts. This book is available open access here.  Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Sidney Lu’s The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868-1961 (Cambridge 2019) places the concept of “Malthusian expansionism” at the center of Japanese settler colonialism around the Pacific. For Japan’s imperial apologists and the discursive architecture they disseminated, alleged overpopulation―or more precisely, a critical imbalance between surplus population and insufficient land and resources―justified expansionism. Simultaneously, both population growth and expansion were signs of national power and prestige. From the colonization of Hokkaido to the realization of a “migration state” in the 1920s and into the postwar period, The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism challenges the conceptual division between settler colonialism and migration, with implications beyond Japanese history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers (Headpress, 2024), Jared Stearns tells the untold story of the world's most famous X-rated star, who rose to fame as the face of Ivory Snow and the star of Behind the Green Door but struggled to find her true self in a world of sex, scandal, and shattered dreams. Marilyn Chambers was the embodiment of the free-spirited Seventies, the world's most famous X-rated star, and an unappreciated talent whose work in adult films hindered her dreams of becoming a serious actress. Raised in an affluent Connecticut suburb, Marilyn catapulted to fame when it was learned that not only had she starred in the groundbreaking X-rated film, Behind the Green Door but was also the model on the box of Ivory Snow laundry detergent (product tagline: "99 44/100% Pure.") Marilyn was the first woman known primarily for her work in adult films to cross over to mainstream entertainment. She sustained a versatile three-decade career in entertainment, including roles in dramatic plays, a Broadway musical revue, her own television show, and the lead role in David Cronenberg's film Rabid.  But her success in adult films also proved to be her undoing. Marred by a violent relationship with her abusive husband-manager, Chuck Traynor, she developed the persona of a twenty-four-hour-a-day sex star. In the process, she lost her sense of self and spent much of her life searching for her true identity. With recollections from family and friends, many of whom have never spoken publicly, along with Marilyn's own words, and never-before-published photos, Jared Stearns vividly captures the revolutionary career of one of the twentieth century's most misunderstood icons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Amidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism. In Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press, 2024), Dr. Gale L. Kenny examines this Christian imperial feminism from the women’s missionary movement to create a Christian world order. She shows that this Christian imperial feminism marked a break from an earlier Protestant worldview that focused on moral and racial purity and in which interactions among races were inconceivable. This new approach actually prioritised issues like civil rights and racial integration, as well as the uplift of women, though the racially diverse world Christianity it aspired to was still to be rigidly hierarchically ordered, with white women retaining a privileged place as guardians. In exposing these dynamics, this book departs from recent scholarship on white evangelical nationalism to focus on the racial politics of white religious liberalism. Christian Imperial Feminism adds a necessary layer to our understanding of religion, gender, and empire. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Running and securing an empire can get expensive–especially one known for its opulence, like the Mughal Empire, which conquered much of northern India before rapidly declining in the eighteenth century. But how did the Mughals get their money? Often, it was through wealthy merchants, like the Jhaveri family, who willingly—and then not-so-willingly–funded the empire’s activities. Dr. Sudev Sheth writes about this relationship in Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Dr. Sheth is Senior Lecturer in History at the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies and in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches across the School of Arts & Sciences and the Wharton School. His writings have appeared in top academic journals and popular outlets, including The Conversation, Economic & Political Weekly, Mint, Knowledge at Wharton, and Harvard Business Publishing. P.S. The Jhaveri family eventually founded the Arvind Group, a major India-based textiles company. Read Sudev’s interview with the MD here! You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bankrolling Empire. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Italy's resurrection from 20 years of fascism, three years of war, and two years of civil war is one of the 20th century's great, under-told stories. It's a history of a decade of clashes and compromises between two mass movements - Communism and Christian Democracy - backed offstage by two superpowers. Above all, it's about the party management of one man - Palmiro Togliatti - and the West-facing vision and cunning of another, Alcide De Gasperi. From the ashes of war, De Gasperi chose a republican government and a market economy, resisted pressure from the Vatican to ally with the far right, and wooed the Americans while acknowledging the unique organisational powers of the Communists until picking the right time to drop them. On top of that, he won Marshall Aid, drove through land reform, and helped found the European communities. As Professor Gilbert writes in Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy (Norton, 2024): "One need only envision what might have happened had De Gasperi failed to make even one of those calls to see how much his agency mattered for Italy's transition to democracy". Mark Gilbert is C. Grove Haines Professor of History and International Studies at SAIS Europe in Bologna. Educated at Durham and the University of Wales, he taught history at the universities of Trento and Bath before joining SAIS. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the eighteenth century, women’s contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives. Their traces were recorded in material ways, through the ink they applied to paper or the artefacts they created with muslin, silk threads, feathers, and shells. Handiwork, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes, and it was deeply connected to colonialism. In Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Chloe Wigston Smith follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America—in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read—and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. A range of artefacts made by women, including makers of colour, brought the global into conversation with domestic crafts and consequently placed images of empire and colonialism within arm’s reach. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women’s material contributions to the home’s place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No (Norton, 2024) is an intellectual inquiry into the moral struggle that whistleblowers face, and why it is not the kind of struggle that most people imagine. Carl Elliott is a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who was trained in medicine as well as philosophy. For many years he fought for an external inquiry into a psychiatric research study at his own university in which an especially vulnerable patient lost his life. Elliott’s efforts alienated friends and colleagues. The university stonewalled him and denied wrongdoing until a state investigation finally vindicated his claims. His experience frames the six stories in this book of medical research in which patients were deceived into participating in experimental programs they did not understand, many of which had astonishing and well-concealed mortality rates. Beginning with the public health worker who exposed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and ending with the four physicians who in 2016 blew the whistle on lethal synthetic trachea transplants at the Karolinska Institute, Elliott tells the extraordinary stories of insiders who spoke out against such abuses, and often paid a terrible price for doing the right thing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

If you don't recall the 1976 Denver Olympic Games, it's because they never happened. The Mile-High City won the right to host the winter games and then was forced by Colorado citizens to back away from its successful Olympic bid through a statewide ballot initiative. In The Olympics that Never Happened: Denver '76 and the Politics of Growth (University of Texas Press, 2022) Dr. Adam Berg details the powerful Colorado regime that gained the games for Denver and the grassroots activism that brought down its Olympic dreams, and he explores the legacy of this milestone moment for the games and politics in the United States. The ink was hardly dry on Denver's host agreement when Mexican American and African American urbanites, white middle-class environmentalists, and fiscally concerned local politicians realised opposition to the Olympics provided them new political openings. The Olympics quickly became a platform for taking stands on a range of issues, from conservation to urban livability to the very idea of growth, which for decades had been unquestioned in Colorado. The Olympics That Never Happened argues that hostility to the Olympics galvanised and empowered diverse citizens in a major US city, with long-term ramifications for Colorado and political activism elsewhere. The Olympics themselves were changed forever, compelling organisers to take seriously competing interests from subgroups within their communities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead. In Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921 (U Nebraska Press, 2020) Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions emerging within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials negotiating the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death as well as how they used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions. Alex Beckstrand is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Connecticut and an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Latinos have long influenced everything from electoral politics to popular culture, yet many people instinctively regard them as recent immigrants rather than a longstanding racial group. In Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism (The New Press, 2020), Laura Gómez, a leading expert on race, law, and society, illuminates the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making of Latino identity that has spanned centuries, leaving a permanent imprint on how race operates in the United States today. Pulling back the lens as the country approaches an unprecedented demographic shift (Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in a matter of decades), Gómez also reveals the nefarious roles the United States has played in Latin America—from military interventions and economic exploitation to political interference—that, taken together, have destabilized national economies to send migrants northward over the course of more than a century. It’s no coincidence that the vast majority of Latinos migrate from the places most impacted by this nation’s dirty deeds, leading Gómez to a bold call for reparations. In this audacious effort to reframe the often-confused and misrepresented discourse over the Latinx generation, Gómez provides essential context for today’s most pressing political and public debates—representation, voice, interpretation, and power—giving all of us a brilliant framework to engage cultural controversies, elections, current events, and more. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Why does Australia have a national signals intelligence agency? What does it do and why is it controversial? And how significant are its ties with key partners, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, to this arrangement? Revealing Secrets: An Unofficial History of Australian Signals Intelligence and the Advent of Cyber (University of New South Wales Press, 2023) co-authored by John Blaxland and Clare Birgin is a compelling account of Australian Signals intelligence, its efforts at revealing the secrets of other nations, and keeping ours safe. It brings to light those clever Australians whose efforts were for so long entirely unknown or overlooked. In unearthing this integral, if hidden and little understood, part of Australian statecraft, this book increases our understanding of the past, present and what lies ahead. John Blaxland is Professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC), Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University (ANU). He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. He is also formerly a military intelligence officer, Head of SDSC and Director of the ANU Southeast Asia Institute. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Serial Mexico: Storytelling Across Media, from Nationhood to Now (Vanderbilt UP, 2023) responds to a continued need to historicize and contextualize seriality, particularly as it exists outside of dominant U.S./European contexts. In Mexico, serialization has been an important feature of narrative since the birth of the nation. Amy Wright's exploration begins with a study of novels serialized in pamphlets and newspapers by key Mexican authors of the nineteenth century, showing that serialization was essential to the development of both the novel and national identities--to Mexican popular culture--during its foundational period. In the twentieth century, a technological explosion after the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) set Mexico's transmedial wheels into motion, as a variety of media recycled and repurposed earlier serialized tales, themselves drawn from a repertoire of oral traditions to national nostalgic effect.  Along the way, Serial Mexico responds to the following series of questions: How has serialized storytelling functioned in Mexico? How can we better understand the relationship of seriality to transmediality through this historical case study? Which stories (characters, themes, storylines, and storyworlds) have circulated repeatedly over time? How have those stories defined Mexico? The goal of this book is to begin to understand some of the possible answers to these questions through five case studies, which highlight five key artifacts, in five different media, at five different historical points spanning nearly two hundred years of Mexico's history. Serial Mexico offers important insights into not only the topic of serialized storytelling, but to larger notions of how national identities are created through narrative, with crucial cultural and sometimes political implications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Infinite Dreams: The Life of Alan Vega (Backbeat, 2024) by Laura Davis-Chanin and Liz Lamere is the first biography on the life of Alan Vega, best known as the co-founder of the punk duo Suicide. In their exhaustive biography Davis-Chanin and Vega's wife of 30 years, Liz Lamere, start with Vega's early life and attempts at astrophysics in college, to his encounter with Iggy Pop that changed his path and encouraged him to become an artist and performer. Infinite Dreams describes Vega’s many experiments across a variety of media, including the partnership with Marty Rev that became Suicide, which challenged audiences to look deep inside themselves and to not settle for distractions. Delving into his artistic life as well as his personal trials, Infinite Dreams combines candid photos, drawing, images of art pieces, and reminiscence of a wide array of musicians and artists, creating an intimate glimpse into the life of Vega and those he influenced.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Think that today's debates about the role of the Federal Reserve Bank, financial regulation, "too big to fail", etc. are new? Think again. Who should control banks, who should regulate banks, what should banks even do--these questions have been debated since the founding of the Republic. Replace CNBC's David Faber with Alexander Hamilton, and Joe Kernan with Thomas Jefferson (or James Madison) and the arguments about banking, moral hazard, and regulation would be largely the same, though the attire would be quite different. Kathleen Day's new book Broken Bargain: Bankers, Bailouts, and the Struggle to Tame Wall Street (Yale University Press, 2019) provides a detailed two-century history of the give and take between government authority and financial institutions (and the individuals caught between them). The challenges over time have changed--the absence of a single currency in the early 19th century, insufficient credit in the late 19th century, the roaring and patently stupid 1920s, and then the whole range of financial innovations in the postwar period--but the key issues recur over and over again. Day sides in the end with the need for consistent regulation from impartial and empowered bureaucrats, but alas, the last two centuries have shown that they are hard to come by. Not everyone will agree with her take on banks and regulation, but there can be no doubt about the underlying "capitalism is messy" theme running through our history and this book. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Until 1900, most political parties in the United States chose their leaders – either in back rooms with a few party elites making decisions or in conventions. The direct primary, in which voters select party nominees for state and federal offices, was one of the most widely adopted political reforms of the early twentieth century Progressive movement. Intuitively, the direct primary sounds democratic. Voters directly select the candidates. They have more of say over who will ultimately represent or govern them. But decades of scholarship suggests that direct primaries might not have changed the outcomes of party nominations. The conventional wisdom is that as the strength of the Progressive movement declined and voters paid attention to other issues. Party leaders were able to reassert control over candidate selection. In Reform and Retrenchment: A Century of Efforts to Fix Primary Elections (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr. Robert G. Boatright insists this narrative is incorrect and misleading for contemporary efforts to reform the primary election system in the U.S. because some of the early concerns about primaries are still with us today. The book presents data from 1928-1970 explaining the type of reforms states implemented and their success or failure. Dr. Boatright argues that the introduction of the indirect primary created more chaos than scholars have previously documented. Political parties, factions, and reform groups manipulated primary election laws to gain advantage, often under the guise of enhancing democracy. How does this history impact contemporary plans for reform of the primary system? Many suggested reforms were tried – and failed – during the 20th century. Boatright concludes that despite the clear flaws in the direct primary system, little can be done to change the primary system. Reformers should instead focus on elections and governance. The end of the podcast features his suggestions. During the podcast, Rob mentions Dr. Jack Santucci’s More Parties or No Parties: The Politics of Electoral Reform in America (Oxford 2022). Dr. Robert G. Boatright is Professor of Political Science at Clark University in Worcester, MA and the Director of Research for the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on the effects of campaign and election laws on the behavior of politicians and interest groups with a particular emphasis on primary elections and campaign finance laws. He is the author or editor of 9 books. Heath Brown and I have interviewed Rob previously on New Books in Political Science: Trumping Politics as Usual:Masculinity, Misogyny, and the 2016 Elections (with co-author Valerie Sperling) and The Deregulatory Moment?: A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Peter Bergamin’s, new book, The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology (I. B. Tauris, 2019), is an intellectual biography of one of the most important propagators of the Maximalist Revisionist stream in Zionism ideology. The book positions Ahimeir within the contexts of the Israeli right and the Zionist movement in general, and corrects some common misunderstandings surrounding the man and his ideology. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Housing experts and activists have long described the foundational role race has played in the creation of mass homeownership. This book insistently tracks the inverse: the role of mass homeownership in changing the definition, perception, and value of race. In The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (Stanford University Press, 2024) Dr. Adrienne Brown reveals how mass homeownership remade the rubrics of race, from the early cases realtors made for homeownership's necessity to white survival through to the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Reading real estate archives and appraisal textbooks alongside literary works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, and Thomas Pynchon, Dr. Brown goes beyond merely identifying the discriminatory mechanisms that the real estate industry used to forestall black homeownership. Rather, she reveals that redlining and other forms of racial discrimination are perceptual modes, changing what it means to sense race and assign it value. Resituating residential discrimination as a key moment within the history of perception and aesthetics as well as of policy, demography, and democracy, we get an even more expansive picture of both its origins and its impacts. This book discovers that the racial honing of perception on the block—seeing race like a bureaucrat, an appraiser, and a homeowner—has become central to the functioning of the residential itself. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A vivid and intimate glimpse of ancient life under the sway of cosmic and spiritual forces that the modern world has forgotten. Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (U California Press, 2024) immerses the reader in the cosmic sea of existences that made up the late ancient Mediterranean world. Loosely structured around events in the biography of one early Christian writer and traveler, this book weaves together the philosophical, religious, sensory, and scientific worlds of the later Roman Empire to tell the story of how human lives were lived under different natural and spiritual laws than those we now know today. This book takes a highly literary and sensory approach to its subject, evoking an imagined experience of an ancient natural and supernatural world, rather than merely explaining ancient thought about the natural world. It mixes visual and literary genres to give the reader a sensory and affective experience of a thought-world that is very different from our own. An experimental intellectual history, Life invites readers into the premodern cosmos to experience a world that is at once familiar, strange, and deeply compelling Mike Chin is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California Davis Michael Motia is a Lecturer in the Religious Studies and Classics Department at UMass Boston ([email protected]) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) introduced a series of state-led initiatives promising modernity, progress, national grandeur, and stability; state surveyors assessed land for agrarian reform, engineers used nationalized oil for industrialization, archaeologists reconstructed pre-Hispanic monuments for tourism, and anthropologists studied and photographed Indigenous populations to achieve their acculturation. Far from accomplishing their stated goals, however, these initiatives concealed violence, and permitted land invasions, forced displacement, environmental damage, loss of democratic freedom, and mass killings.  In Visible Ruins: The Politics of Perception and the Legacies of Mexico's Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2024), Mónica M. Salas Landa uses the history of northern Veracruz to demonstrate how these state-led efforts reshaped the region's social and material landscapes, affecting what was and is visible. Relying on archival sources and ethnography, she uncovers a visual order of ongoing significance that was established through postrevolutionary projects and that perpetuates inequality based on imperceptibility. Mónica M. Salas Landa is an Associate Professor of anthropology and sociology at Lafayette College. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations (Cambridge UP, 2024) is an illuminating account of the cultural, social, and economic history of the sale of 'French sex'. It explores the discourses and experiences surrounding the early twentieth century debate on sex trafficking, which mobilized various international reform movements to combat the coerced prostitution of young women abroad. According to popular legend and empirical studies, French women were present in brothels all over the world, where they were the most desired and best paid in the business. But were they trafficking victims or willing migrants? In this timely book, Elisa Camiscioli reconstructs the networks and mechanisms of cross-border migrations for sexual labor; elucidates women's motives for leaving and staying; and explains why French migrant sexual labor occupied such a prominent place in the underworld of prostitution, as well as in the imaginaries of anti-trafficking campaigners, immigration officials, and ordinary consumers of vice. Elisa Camiscioli is a professor of history at Binghamton University. She specializes in immigration to and from France, sex trafficking, and race and sexual politics in modern France and its empire. She completed a B.A., cum laude, at University of Pennsylvania and earned a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. In addition to a number of peer-reviewed articles, she is the author of Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Duke University Press. 2009). Dr. Camiscioli was co-editor of the Journal of Women's History from 2015 to 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Profit ― getting more out of something than you put into it ― is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored in wood, exploit the land, and refashion ecosystems. As civilization developed, we found more and more ways of extracting surplus value from the earth, often deploying brutally effective methods to discipline people to do the work needed. In Profit: An Environmental History (Polity Press, 2022), Historian Mark Stoll explains how capitalism supercharged this process and traces its many environmental consequences. The financial innovations of medieval Italy created trade networks that, with the European discovery of the Americas, made possible vast profits and sweeping cultural changes, to the detriment of millions of slaves and indigenous Americans; the industrial age united the world in trade and led to an energy revolution that changed lives everywhere. But when efficient production left society awash in goods, a new sort of capitalism, predicated on endless individual consumption, took its place. This story of incredible ingenuity and villainy begins in the Doge’s palace in medieval Venice and ends with Jeff Bezos aboard his own spacecraft. Mark Stoll’s revolutionary account places environmental factors at the heart of capitalism’s progress and reveals the long shadow of its terrible consequences. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Cian T. McMahon is an associate professor of history at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. His research focuses on the history and identity of the Irish Diaspora. In this interview, he discusses his new book The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine (NYU Press, 2021), a social history of migration during the Great Irish Famine (1845-55). Drawing primarily on migrants’ diaries and letters, The Coffin Ship reconstructs the experience of leaving Ireland by sea during the cataclysm of the Famine of the late 1840s and early 1850s, when approximately 2.2 million people left Ireland. With chapters examining “Preparation”, “Embarkation”, “Life”, “Death”, and “Arrival”, McMahon not only provides an intimate account of migrant experiences but also places this migration into its British imperial and Atlantic contexts, tracing maritime routes from Ireland to Liverpool and from there to Quebec, the United States and Australia. McMahon’s book also investigates popular memories of the Famine, not least the assumption that the “coffin ships” that passed back and forth between Ireland and Eastern Canada were sites of mass death. The Coffin Ship is published by NYU Press as part of their new Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this special episode, we talk to two authors about the role of financial institutions in enslavement. Sharon Ann Murphy, associate professor of history, argues in Banking on Slavery Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (University of Chicago Press, 2023) that Southern banks’ willingness to use enslaved people as loan collateral led to the exponential growth of Southern enslavement during the 1820-30s. In filmmaker, producer, and author David Montero’s book, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations (Hatchette Book Group, 2024), he follows Wall Street bankers and large Northern banks were critical to the financing of slavery and, in turn, who massed incredible wealth from enslavement. Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator and assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World (Basic Book, 2024) recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus. Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. The once mighty empire was under pressure from global economic change and European imperial expansion. Reforms in the mid-nineteenth century raised tensions across the empire, nowhere more so than in Damascus. A multifarious city linked by caravan trade to Baghdad, the Mediterranean and Mecca, the chaos of languages, customs and beliefs made Damascus a warily tolerant place. Until the reforms began to advantage the minority Christian community at the expense of the Muslim majority. But in 1860 people who had generally lived side by side for generations became bitter enemies as news of civil war in Mount Lebanon arrived in the city. Under the threat of a French expeditionary force, the Ottomans dealt with the disaster effectively and ruthlessly - but the old, generally quite tolerant Damascene world lay in ruins. It would take a quarter of a century to restore stability and prosperity to the Syrian capital. This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story. Eugene Rogan is author of the bestselling The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920. He is professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford and Director of the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Joseph A. Skloot joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, First Impressions: Sefer hasimdim and Early Modern Hebrew Printing (Brandeis UP, 2023). First Impressions uncovers the history of creative adaptation and transformation through a close analysis of the creation of the Sefer Hasidim book. In 1538, a partnership of Jewish silk makers in the city of Bologna published a book entitled Sefer Hasidim, a compendium of rituals, stories, and religious instruction that primarily originated in medieval Franco-Germany. How these men, of Italian and Spanish descent, came to produce a book that would come to shape Ashkenazic culture, and Jewish culture more broadly, over the next four centuries is the basis of this kaleidoscopic study of the history of Hebrew printing in the sixteenth century. During these early years of printing, the classic works of ancient and medieval Hebrew and Jewish literature became widely available to Jewish (and non-Jewish) readers for the first time. Printing, though, was not merely the duplication and distribution of pre-existing manuscripts, it was the creative adaptation and transformation of those manuscripts by printers. Ranging from Catholic Bologna to Protestant Basel to the Jewish heartland of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Skloot uncovers the history of that creativity by examining the first two print editions of Sefer Hasidim. Along the way, he demonstrates how volumes that were long thought to be eternal and unchanging were in fact artifacts of historical agency and contingency, created by and for human beings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Highlands and Islands of Scotland: A New History (Birlinn, 2024) by Alistair Moffat, the chronicle begins millions of years ago, with the dramatic geological events that formed the awe-inspiring yet beloved landscapes, followed by the arrival of hunter gatherers and the monumental achievements of prehistoric peoples in places like Skara Brae in Orkney. The story continues with the mysterious Picts; the arrival of the Romans as they expanded the boundaries of their huge empire; the coming of Christianity and the Gaelic language from Ireland; the Viking invasion and the establishment of the great Lordship of the Isles that lasted for three hundred years. The Highlands are perhaps best known as the key battleground in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s doomed attempt to restore the Stuart monarchy and its dreadful aftermath, which saw the suppression of the clans and the whole of Highland culture. This situation was exacerbated by the terrible Clearances of the nineteenth century which saw tens of thousands evicted from their native lands and forced to emigrate. But, after centuries of decline, the Highlands are being renewed, the land is coming alive once more, and the story ends on an upbeat note as the Highlands look forward to a future full of possibilities. While this is an epic history of a fascinating subject, Moffat also features the stories of individuals, the telling moments and the crucial details which enrich the human story and add context and colour to the saga of Scotland. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California (NYU Press, 2023) tells the story of the federal government’s Depression-era effort to redeem Dust Bowl refugees in rural California through the religion of reform. During the Depression hundreds of thousands of families left the Great Plains and Southwest to look for farm work in California. Seeing destitute white families living in filthy shelters, reform-minded New Deal officials built a series of camps to provide shelter and community.  Drawn from the archives of the federal camp system, Jonathan H. Ebel tells the story of the religious dynamics in and around the farm labor camps, making the case that they served as mission sites for the conversion of migrants to more modern ways of living and believing, centered around ideas of virtuous citizenship based on a foundation of seemingly secular values such as cleanliness, hard work, and family life. The migrants, particularly those who came from charismatic and conservative Protestant faiths, sometimes had different ideas about right living.  Ebel shows how the New Deal program was animated simultaneously by humanitarian concern and by the belief that these poor white migrants and their religious practices needed to be transformed for them to achieve a better life in a modernized, secular world.  Recommended reading:  The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The United States was an upside-down British Empire. It had an agrarian economy, few large investors, and no territorial holdings outside of North America. However, decades before the Spanish-American War, the United States quietly began to establish an empire across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. While conventional wisdom suggests that large interests – the military and major business interests – drove American imperialism, The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2024) argues that early American imperialism was driven by small entrepreneurs. When commodity prices boomed, these small entrepreneurs took risks, racing ahead of the American state. Yet when profits were threatened, they clamored for the US government to follow them into the Pacific. Through novel, intriguing stories of American small businessmen, this book shows how American entrepreneurs manipulated the United States into pursuing imperial projects in the Pacific. It explores their travels abroad and highlights the consequences of contemporary struggles for justice in the Pacific. Our guests today are: Miles M. Evers, who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut; and Eric Grynaviski, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Alan McGowan delves into Franz Boas’s dual identity as both a scientist and a political activist, shedding light on how his work transcended academic boundaries to make a profound impact on society. In The Political Activism of Anthropologist Franz Boas, Citizen Scientist (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2024), McGowan provides a comprehensive overview of Boas’s career, from his groundbreaking research on cultural relativism to his advocacy for social justice and racial equality. By drawing on a wealth of primary sources and historical documents, he paints a vivid portrait of Boas as a multifaceted figure whose work was deeply intertwined with his political beliefs. Uncovering the intricate connection between his scientific endeavors and political beliefs, McGowan illuminates how Boas used his platform as an anthropologist to challenge societal norms and advocate for those on the fringes. Furthermore, the book offers valuable insights into the broader implications of Boas’s legacy. By emphasizing Boas’s commitment to antiracism, cultural relativism, and social justice, the author underscores the enduring relevance of Boas’s ideas in contemporary discussions on race, identity, and inequality. McGowan’s insightful analysis and engaging narrative style make this book a valuable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the intersection of science, politics, and social change. Alan H. McGowan is Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at The New School. Prior to coming to The New School, he founded and was president of the Gene Media Forum, an arm of the Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse University. Previously, he was for twenty years the president of the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information, a major bridge between the scientific community and the media. His research interests focus on the intersection between science and technology and social issues, including ethics, politics, and the economy. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 is commonly seen as the Wehrmacht's first defeat. In Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942 (FSG, 2019), David Stahel argues that it was in fact their first strategic success in the east. The mismanaged Soviet Counteroffensive became a phyrric victory as both sides struggled with strategic leadership and supply. German generals, caught between Stalin's hammer and Hitler's anvil, found loopholes in increasingly irrational orders to hold at all costs. Drawing on official war diaries, journals, memoirs, and correspondence, Stahel's latest installment in his reevaluation of the eastern front delivers a vivid account that challenges what you thought you knew about the war in the Soviet Union. David Stahel is the author of five previous books on Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union. He completed an MA in war studies at King's College London in 2000 and a PhD at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2009. His research primarily concentrates on the German military in World War II. Dr. Stahel is a senior lecturer in European history at the University of New South Wales, and he teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Asaf Elia-Shalev's book Israel's Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth (U California Press, 2024) tells the story of the young and impoverished Moroccan Israeli Jews who challenged their country's political status quo and rebelled against the ethnic hierarchy of Israeli life in the 1970s. Inspired by the American group of the same name, the Black Panthers mounted protests and a years-long political campaign for the rights of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry. They managed to rattle the country's establishment and change the course of Israel's history through the mass mobilization of a Jewish underclass. This book draws on archival documents and interviews with elderly activists to capture the movement's history and reveal little-known stories from within the group. Asaf Elia-Shalev explores the parallels between the Israeli and American Black Panthers, offering a unique perspective on the global struggle against racism and oppression. In twenty short and captivating chapters, Israel's Black Panthers provides a textured and novel account of the movement and reflects on the role that Mizrahim can play in the future of Israel. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What roles did Americans play in the expanding global empires of the nineteenth century? In The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society (Columbia University Press, 2024), Thomas M. Larkin examines the Hong Kong–based Augustine Heard & Company, the most prominent American trading firm in treaty-port China, to explore the ways American elites at once made and were made by British colonial society. Following the Heard brothers throughout their firm’s rise and decline, The China Firm reveals how nineteenth-century China’s American elite adapted to colonial culture, helped entrench social and racial hierarchies, and exploited the British imperial project for their own profit as they became increasingly invested in its political affairs and commercial networks. Through the central narrative of Augustine Heard & Co., Larkin disentangles the ties that bound the United States to China and the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a vast range of archival material from Hong Kong, China, Boston, and London, he weaves the local and the global together to trace how Americans gained acceptance into and contributed to the making of colonial societies and world-spanning empires. Uncovering the transimperial lives of these American traders and the complex ways extraimperial communities interacted with British colonialism, The China Firm makes a vital contribution to global histories of nineteenth-century Asia and provides an alternative narrative of British empire. Thomas Larkin in Assistant Professor of History at the University of Prince Edward Island. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past—and future—of global agriculture. Dr. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South.  Expansive in scope, this book draws on archival records of the earliest Green Revolution projects in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as interviews at development institutions and agribusinesses working to deliver genetically modified crops to millions of small-scale farmers across Africa. From the offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the halls of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies to field trials of hybrid maize in Kenya, Dr. Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The largest slave uprising in the 18th century British Caribbean was also a node of the global conflict called the Seven Year’s War, though it isn’t usually thought of that way. In the first few days of the quarantine and our current geopolitical and epidemiological shitshow, John and Elizabeth spoke with Vincent Brown, who recently published Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Harvard UP, 2019), centered on a group of enslaved West Africans, known under the term “Coromantees” who were the chief protagonists in this war. Tracing the vectors of this war within the Caribbean, the North Atlantic, and West Africa, Vince shows us how these particular enslaved Africans, who are caught in the gears of one of human history’s most dehumanizing institutions, constrained by repressive institutions, social-inscribed categories of differences and brutal force, operate tactically within and across space in complex and cosmopolitan ways. Vince locates his interest in warfare (as an object of study) in emergence of new world order and disorder through the Gulf Wars. His attention to routes and mobilities he credits to an epidemiological turn of mind–perhaps inherited from his father Willie Brown, a medical microbiologist now retired from UCSD. The idea of the vector shaped his first book as well. Vince’s “cartographic narrative” “A Slave Revolt in Jamaica: 1760-1761” and the film he produced with director Llewellyn Smith, Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (which traces African studies and anthropology’s understanding of cultural movements from between Africa and the Americas) also explore these burning questions. Along the way, Vince discusses C.L.R. James’ notion of conflict, war and global connectedness in The Black Jacobins and the ways that categories of social difference both are constituted by global capital (reminding us of our conversation on caste, class and whiteness with Ajantha Subramanian) and those bumper stickers from the early 1980s in which the Taliban were the good guys. Mentioned in this episode: Rambo III (1988) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself (1789) Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688) Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (2002) C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938) John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic World-1400-1800 (1992) Derrick ‘Black X’ Robinson on his advocacy to make Tacky a national hero in Jamaica Black X walks barefoot across Jamaica to make Tacky a national hero  Recallable Books: Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (2009) John Tutino, Making a New World (2011) Angel Palerm, The First Economic World-System (1980) Listen and Read Here: 34 The Caribbean and Vectors of Warfare: Vincent Brown Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

How was the Roman way of war unique, and what were the virtues that defined the Roman Republic? Are there lessons for modern Republics from the Roman one? Annika sits down with 2022-2023 James Madison Program Garwood Visiting Fellow Dr. Steele Brand, a professor of history and director of the Politics, Philosophy, and History Program at Cairn University. Dr. Brand, Professor of History at Cairn University and former U.S. Army tactical intelligence officer to discuss his book Killing for the Republic: Citizen-Soldiers and the Roman Way of War (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019). Dr. Brand shares why, while serving in Afghanistan, he felt compelled to write a book about ancient citizen-soldiery. He discusses the virtues that defined Roman citizen-soldiers and how these virtues contributed to Rome's resilience and success, how these Classical virtues intersect with modern Christian virtues, and the fall of the Republic. The conversation also touches on the challenges of maintaining these virtues in modern democracies and the parallels between ancient Roman and modern American republicanism. Steele Brand, 2022-2023 James Madison Program Garwood Visiting Fellow, is a Professor of History at Cairn University, where he is also the director and founder of the Politics, Philosophy, & History Program. Formerly, he has taught at The King's College and The University of Texas at Austin. A former U.S. Army tactical intelligence officer, he has also managed a veterans’ reintegration program in Manassas, VA and directed a military historical training program. He received his Ph.D. from Baylor University and his M.A.Th. from Southwestern Seminary, and is currently completing a manuscript on the conception and early exemplars of late antique statesmanship. Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

“Wisconsin has always been my home. It’s not a place, however, where I’ve always felt at home,” (ix) declares Dr. Sergio M. González in the first two lines of his acknowledgments for his recently published book Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging & Faith in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (University of Illinois Press, 2024). These two sentences are the essence of the manuscript as González guides the reader through a one-hundred-year history of Latino migration, settlement, and religious life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and surrounding rural regions. Many different nationalities that fall under the banner of the “Latino” identity have made home, work, and life in Wisconsin, but their presence was met with varying scales of hospitality – the act of welcoming “the stranger.” He writes in the Introduction, “Strangers No Longer demonstrates that relationships within hospitality interactions are in fact relations of power” (3). It is through a framework of hospitality that González structures his manuscript to show how clergy and laity accepted, to varying degrees, newly arrived Latinos in Wisconsin. Wisconsin religious institutions have a long engagement with Latino populations. From the arrival of Mexican immigrant laborers in the 1920s who were recruited as strikebreakers, to post-war Tejano and Puerto Rican migrants who were encouraged to assimilate into eurocentric ideals of belonging, and finally to the 1980s Sanctuary Movement in which Central American asylees sought protection from state and federal immigration enforcement, each of these topics and more are covered in Strangers No Longer. González skillfully crafts a narrative where the reader witnesses the development of the relationship between Wisconsin religious institutions and various Latino communities as one moving from a relationship of paternalism in the early 20th century to one of self-determination by the late 20th century. “Wisconsin Latinos pushed churches to acknowledge that they were no longer guests in their communities, or, in the words of the organizers of a statewide conference held in Appleton in 1974, ‘strangers in our homeland’” (141). By the 21st century, González asserts, the church had become a site for Latino political consciousness and resistance for decades. González’s methodological rigor, clear writing, and strong theoretical grounding allow the reader to understand the delicate political, racial, economic, and spiritual power relations at play for Latinos in the Midwest during the 20th century. Strangers No Longer is a valuable read for undergraduate courses in Latino history, religious history, and social movement history. Alongside his academic work, González is building out his public history projects that offer primers on the sanctuary movement, immigration history, and Latino religious life in the Midwest. Links to Dr. Gonzalez’s publications and projects: Strangers No Longer Mexicans in Wisconsin Wisconsin Latinx History Collective PBS Wisconsin's The Look Back  Wisconsin Historical Society's upcoming History Center Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology (MIT Press, 2024), Elena Kochetkova examines the relationship between nature and humans under state socialism by looking at the industrial role of Soviet forests. The book explores evolving Soviet policies of wood consumption, discussing how professionals working in the forestry industry of the Soviet state viewed the present and future of forests by considering them both a natural resource and a trove of industrial material. The book also discusses how post-Soviet industry has abandoned these socialist practices and the idea of nature as a complicated ecosystem that provides a crucial service to society. Within the context of the current environmental crisis, the book invites readers to reevaluate state socialism as a complex phenomenon with sophisticated interactions between nature and industry. In so doing, it contributes a fresh perspective on the activities of socialist experts and their view of nature, shedding light on Soviet state industrial and environmental policy and its continuing legacy in the present day. Elena Kochetkova is Associate Professor in Modern European Economic History at the Department of Archeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen. She served as a Secretary of the European Society of Environmental History from 2019 to 2021. Ailin Zhou is a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Chinese cinema, Asian diasporic visual culture, contemporary art, and feminist and queer theories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Victoria Khiterer's book Jewish City Or Inferno of Russian Israel?: A History of the Jews in Kiev Before February 1917 (Academic Studies Press, 2017) describes the history of Jews in Kiev from the tenth century to the February 1917 Revolution. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Kiev Jewish community was one of the largest and wealthiest in the Russian Empire. This book illuminates the major processes and events in Kievan Jewish history, including the creation of the Jewish community, the expulsions of Jews from the city, government persecution and Jewish pogroms, the Beilis Affair, the participation of Jews in the political, economic, and cultural life of Kiev, and their contribution to the development of the city. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

European colonialism was often driven by the pursuit of natural resources, and the resulting colonisation and decolonization processes have had a profound impact on the formation of the majority of sovereign states that exist today. But how exactly have natural resources influenced the creation of formerly colonised states? And would the world map of sovereign states look significantly different if not for these resources? These questions are at the heart of Fueling Sovereignty: Colonial Oil and the Creation of Unlikely States (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which focuses primarily on oil as the most significant natural resource of the modern era. Dr. Naosuke Mukoyama provides a compelling analysis of how colonial oil politics contributed to the creation of some of the world's most “unlikely” states. Drawing on extensive archival sources on Brunei, Qatar and Bahrain, he sheds light on how some small colonial entities achieved independence despite their inclusion in a merger project promoted by the metropole and regional powers. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2024), Glenn Dynner tells the story of an unexpected Hasidic revival in Poland between the two World Wars. In the aftermath of World War I, the Jewish mystical movement appeared to be in shambles. Hasidic leaders had dispersed, Hasidic courts lay in ruins, and the youth seemed swept up in secularist trends as a result of mandatory public schooling and new Jewish movements like Zionism and Socialism. Dynner shows that in response to this, Hasidic leaders reinvented themselves as educators devoted to rescuing the youth by means of thriving networks of heders (primary schools), Bais Yaakov schools for girls and women, and world-renowned yeshivas. During the ensuing pedagogical revolution, Hasidic yeshivas soon overshadowed courts, and Hasidic leaders became known more for scholarship than miracle-working. By mobilizing Torah study, Hasidic leaders were able to subvert the "civilizing" projects of the Polish state, successfully rival Zionists and Socialists, and create clandestine yeshiva bunkers in ghettos during the Holocaust. Torah study was thus not only a spiritual-intellectual endeavor but a political practice that fueled a formidable culture of resistance. The Light of Learning belies notions of late Hasidic decadence and decline and transforms our understanding of Polish Jewry during its final hour. Glenn Dynner is the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Professor of Judaic Studies at Fairfield University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface. Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music. Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University ([email protected]). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Tara López's Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso (University of Texas Press, 2024), is an immersive study of the influential and predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene in El Paso, Texas. Punk rock is known for its daring subversion, and so is the West Texas city of El Paso. In Chuco Punk, Tara López dives into the rebellious sonic history of the city, drawing on more than seventy interviews with punks, as well as unarchived flyers, photos, and other punk memorabilia.  Connecting the scene to El Paso's own history as a borderland, a site of segregation, and a city with a long lineage of cultural and musical resistance, López throws readers into the heat of backyard punx shows, the chaos of riots in derelict mechanic shops, and the thrill of skateboarding on the roofs of local middle schools. She reveals how, in this predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene, women forged their own space, sound, and community. Covering the first roots of Chuco punk in the late 1970s through the early 2000s, López moves beyond the breakout bands to shed light on how the scene influenced not only the contours of sound and El Paso but the entire topography of punk rock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the 1920s, before the establishment of the state of Israel, a group of German Jews settled in a garden city on the outskirts of Jerusalem. During World War II, their quiet community, nicknamed Grunewald on the Orient, emerged as both an immigrant safe haven and a lively expatriate hotspot, welcoming many famous residents including poet-playwright Else Lasker-Schüler, historian Gershom Scholem, and philosopher Martin Buber. It was an idyllic setting, if fraught with unique tensions on the fringes of the long-divided holy city. After the war, despite the weight of the Shoah, the neighborhood miraculously repaired shattered bonds between German and Israeli residents. In German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighbourhood in the Holy City (Haus Publishers, 2021), Thomas Sparr opens up the history of this remarkable community and the forgotten borderland they called home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Eleanor Medhurst joins us today to talk about Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion (Hurst & Company, 2024). Clothes are integral to lesbian history. Lesbians, in turn, are integral to the history of fashion. The way that we dress can help us to present who we are to the world, or it can help us to hide ourselves. It can align us with a community or make us stand out from the crowd. For lesbians, fashion can have innumerable meanings - yet "lesbian fashion" is rarely considered, the main association between lesbians and their clothes being of un-fashionability.  In Unsuitable, Eleanor Medhurst explores the history of lesbian fashion, a field that has been overwhelmingly ignored within both fashion and queer histories. Unsuitable uncovers the relationships between lesbians and their clothes as well as their fashionable details, from top hats to violet tiaras. It spans centuries and continents: Anne Lister of nineteenth century Yorkshire and "Paris Lesbos" of the 1920s, butch/femme bar culture of the 1950s and lesbian activists in the '80s. It celebrates Black lesbian histories, trans lesbian histories, and histories of gender-nonconformity. The lesbian past is slippery; it has often deliberately been hidden, altered or left unrecorded. This book lights it up and shares it with the world, adorned in all its finery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

With a focus on Robert Morrison, Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology (U Notre Dame Press, 2024) evaluates the role of nineteenth-century British missionaries in the early development of the cross-cultural relationship between China and the English-speaking world. As one of the first generation of British Protestant missionaries, Robert Morrison went to China in 1807 with the goal of evangelizing the country. His mission pushed him into deeper engagement with Chinese language and culture, and the exchange flowed both ways as Morrison—a working-class man whose firsthand experiences made him an “accidental expert”—brought depictions of China back to eager British audiences. Author Jonathan A. Seitz proposes that, despite the limitations imposed by the orientalism impulse of the era, Morrison and his fellow missionaries were instrumental in creating a new map of cross-cultural engagement that would evolve, ultimately, into modern sinology. Engaging and well researched, Protestant Missionaries in China explores the impact of Morrison and his contemporaries on early sinology, mission work, and Chinese Christianity during the three decades before the start of the Opium Wars. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust?  In Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy (Norton, 2019), Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts. Benjamin Balint, a fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, is the author most recently of Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History (Norton), winner of a National Jewish Book Award. His book Kafka's Last Trial (Norton) won the Sami Rohr Prize and has been translated into a dozen languages. He is also the co-author, with Merav Mack, of Jerusalem: City of the Book (Yale). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

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, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains--from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon--mapping instead the decent into total war. The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing the illusion of "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and conflict brief. Such as almost never been the case. Even one-sided battles have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating erosion of the other side's defenses, resources, and will. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The idea of sexual fluidity may seem new, but it is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, who wrote about queer experiences with remarkable frankness, wit, and insight. Sarah Nooter's  How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (Princeton UP, 2024) is an infatuating collection of these writings about desire, love, and lust between men, between women, and between humans and gods, in lucid and lively new translations. Filled with enthralling stories, this anthology invites readers of all sexualities and identities to explore writings that describe many kinds of erotic encounters and feelings, and that envision a playful and passionate approach to sexuality as part of a rich and fulfilling life. How to Be Queer starts with Homer's Iliad and moves through lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, and biography, drawing on a wide range of authors, including Sappho, Plato, Anacreon, Pindar, Theognis, Aristophanes, and Xenophon. It features both beautiful poetry and thought-provoking prose, emotional outpourings and humorous anecdotes. From Homer's story of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, one of the most intense between men in world literature, to Sappho's lyrics on the pleasures and pains of loving women, these writings show the many meanings of what the Greeks called eros. Complete with brief introductions to the selections, and with the original Greek on facing pages, How to Be Queer reveals what the Greeks knew long ago--that the erotic and queer are a source of life and a cause for celebration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Ramón Espejo's book The Catalonian Journey of American Drama 1909-2000: From Jimmy Valentine to The Vagina Monologues (Legenda, 2024) delves into the fascinating journey of American drama in Catalonia, exploring how the theatrical output of a world superpower has impacted (and transformed) the stages of an allegedly minor actor in the cultural scene of the 20th century. Yet, while Catalonia is the birthplace of such geniuses as Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí or Antoni Gaudí, it is also that of playwrights Joan Brossa, Manuel de Pedrolo, Fermín Cabal or Jordi Galcerán, among others. All of them grew up in, and imbibed, a theatrescape in which American borrowings were not only habitual (often the only foreign plays around) but inspiring and groundbreaking. If Alias Jimmy Valentine re-defined theatrical decorum in Catalonia in the early 1900s, The Vagina Monologues, in the 1990s, challenged prevalent sexual taboos. Throughout the 20th century, Catalonia went from a peripheral, marginalized region of a once vast empire to a booming and largely autonomous centre of culture, recognized all over the world and admired for its uniqueness and original artistic contributions. American plays accompanied, and often directly inspired, such a journey. Ramón Espejo is Full Professor of American Literature at the University of Seville, Spain, and is one of the leading American drama and theatre scholars in Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Many of us know that immigrants have been deported from the United States for well over a century, but has anyone ever asked how? In The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020), author Adam Goodman brings together new archival evidence to write an expansive history of deportation from the United States that threads the late-nineteenth century through to the present. Goodman, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino studies as well as history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argues that the “deportation machine” operated through three main mechanisms: formal deportations, voluntary departures, and self-deportations. But contrary to mainstream assumptions about the U.S. immigration system, the overwhelming majority of deportations throughout the 1900s have not been formal proceedings in immigration court, but instead administrative processes and informal fear campaigns that pushed immigrants out of the country. Our interview with Goodman will cover how the history of deportation is linked with the development of federal power, state coercion, and activist resistance for due process. We also discuss the connections between the deportation machine and the contemporary debate on the prison-industrial complex, anti-immigrant prejudice, and demands for police reform. Far beyond the harsh realities of deportation, this book shows us how the politics of expulsion sought to define who truly belonged in America. Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Aya Gruber, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, has written a history of how the women’s movement in America has shaped the law on domestic violence and sexual assault. In The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration (University of California Press, 2020), Professor Gruber contends that the legal reform movement on sexual assault began with feminists in the 19th century, who argued in favor of temperance reform, partly in the hope that it would lead to less violence against women. She also argues that the social context in which sexual assault allegations were made in the 19th century, especially regarding African-American males and white women, influenced the outcomes in legal cases and divided the feminists of the 19th century. Professor Gruber also addresses the fissures created in the women’s movement from the 1960s through today regarding how sexual assault should be treated under the law has worked against justice for both victims and their assailants. Professor Gruber argues that sexual assault law is premised upon erroneous beliefs about how men and women interact, the norms of nonverbal conduct, and the efficacy of punitive solutions. In addition to covering the history of sexual assault law she addresses how the criminal law might be reformed to meet the “convergent interests” of men and women. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On Crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other’s military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonization, questioning their work ethic, social organization, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity. Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250, Medicine, Power and Religion (Boydell and Brewer, 2021), provides a radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength, and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialized others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, and ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others. Claire Weeda is a cultural historian at the Institute for History at Leiden University, Netherlands. Her main fields of interest include ethnic stereotyping, the history of the body, Greco-Arabic medicine, and organic politics in Europe, 1100-1500. Evan Zarkadas is a graduate student of European history at the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Daniel Rachel's new book Too Much Too Young, the 2 Tone Records Story: Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of a Generation (Akashic, 2024) presents the definitive history of 2 Tone Records. In 1979, 2 Tone Records exploded into the consciousness of music lovers in Britain, the US, and beyond, as albums by the Specials, the Selecter, Madness, the English Beat, and the Bodysnatchers burst onto the charts and a youth movement was born. 2 Tone was Black and white: a multiracial force of British and Caribbean musicians singing about social issues, racism, class, and gender struggles. It spoke of injustices in society and fought against rightwing extremism. It was exuberant and eclectic: white youths learning to dance to the infectious rhythm of ska and reggae, crossed with a punk attitude, to create an original hybrid. The idea of 2 Tone was born in Coventry, England, and masterminded by a middle-class art student, Jerry Dammers, who envisioned an English Motown. Dammers signed a slew of successful artists, and a number of successive hits propelled 2 Tone onto Top of the Pops and into the hearts and minds of a generation. However, infighting among the bands and the pressures of running a label caused 2 Tone to bow to the inevitable weight of expectation and recrimination. Over the following years, Dammers built the label back up again, entering a new phase full of fresh signings and a beautiful end-piece finale in the activist hit song “(Free) Nelson Mandela.” Told in three parts, Too Much Too Young is the definitive story of a label that for a brief, bright burning moment shaped British, American, and world culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

"When the Spanish colonization of the Philippines began in 1565, early reports boasted of mass conversions to Christianity and ever-increasing numbers of people paying tribute to the Spanish crown. This suggests an uncomplicated story of an easy imposition of Spanish sovereignty.  But as Stephanie Mawson shows in her book, Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines (Cornell UP, 2023), the Spanish colonization of the Philippines was contested at every step, went on for centuries, and in many respects remained incomplete. Mawson tells the story of the diverse peoples who resisted Spanish colonization, in some cases for over 300 years. These included the “fugitives, apostates, and rebels, Chinese laborers, Moro slave raiders, native priestesses, Aeta headhunters, Pampangan woodcutters, and many others... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Matthew Kadane, Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, talks about his just new book, The Enlightenment and Original Sin (University of Chicago Press, 2024). An eloquent microhistory that argues for the centrality of the doctrine of original sin to the Enlightenment. What was the Enlightenment? This question has been endlessly debated. In The Enlightenment and Original Sin, historian Matthew Kadane advances the bold claim that the Enlightenment is best defined through what it set out to accomplish, which was nothing short of rethinking the meaning of human nature. Kadane argues that this project centered around the doctrine of original sin and, ultimately, its rejection, signaling the radical notion that an inherently flawed nature can be overcome by human means. Kadane explores these ambitious, wide-ranging themes through the story of the largely unknown Pentecost Barker, an eighteenth-century "purser" and wine merchant. Examining Barker's diary and correspondence with a Unitarian minister, Kadane tracks the transformation of Barker's consciousness from a Puritan to an Enlightenment outlook, revealing in one man's transformation large-scale shifts in self-understanding whose philosophical reverberations would (and have continued to) shape debates on human nature for centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In People's Diplomacy: How Americans and Chinese Transformed US-China Relations During the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2024), Kazushi Minami shows how the American and Chinese people rebuilt US-China relations in the 1970s, a pivotal decade bookended by Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China and 1979 normalization of diplomatic relations. Top policymakers in Washington and Beijing drew the blueprint for the new bilateral relationship, but the work of building it was left to a host of Americans and Chinese from all walks of life, who engaged in "people-to-people" exchanges. After two decades of estrangement and hostility caused by the Cold War, these people dramatically changed the nature of US-China relations. Americans reimagined China as a country of opportunities, irresistible because of its prodigious potential, while Chinese reinterpreted the United States as an agent of modernization, capable of enriching their country and rejuvenating their lives. Drawing on extensive research at two dozen archives in the United States and China, People's Diplomacy redefines contemporary US-China relations as a creation of the American and Chinese people. Kazushi Minami is Associate Professor at the Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin before joining OSIPP in 2019. Drawing on English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sources, his research investigates various aspects of international relations in East Asia to foster a deeper understanding of the region from both historical and policy perspectives. Nick Zeller is an independent scholar working on China’s international relations and the history of radical politics in Asia. He has held faculty positions in History at the University of South Carolina and Kennesaw State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Modern Chinese History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The definitive illustrated book on "The Boss"-- Springsteen: Album by Album (Palazzo Editions, 2024) is now updated to celebrate Bruce Springsteen’s 75th birthday! Renowned for his passionate songwriting, galvanizing live shows, and political activism, Bruce Springsteen stands astride the rock 'n' roll stage like a colossus--and the iconic rocker shows no signs of slowing down. With in-depth reviews of 21 studio albums spanning over 6 decades of music history, Springsteen delves into every aspect of the superstar's career. Richly photographed, and featuring brilliant writing by one of America's top music critics as well as an introduction by Peter Ames Carlin (author of the bestselling biography Bruce). Ryan White has been writing cultural features for over twenty years, and is the author of Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way. Ryan on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In December 1948, a panel of 12 judges sentenced 23 Japanese officials for war crimes. Seven, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, were sentenced to death. The sentencing ended the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, an over-two-year-long trial over Imperial Japan’s atrocities in China and its decision to attack the U.S. But unlike the trials at Nuremberg, now seen as one of the touchstones of modern international law, the trials at Tokyo were a messy affair. The ruling wasn’t unanimous, with two judges dissenting. Indian judge Radhabinod Pal even chose to acquit everybody. The judges couldn’t agree on anything, the prosecution made significant mistakes, and the defense constantly complained about not having enough time and resources. Gary Bass tells the entire story of the trials at Tokyo—from their formulation at the end of a long World War by a triumphant yet weary U.S., to the eventual decision to let many sentenced defendants out on parole as Japan became a close Cold War ally of Washington—in his book Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Knopf: 2023) Gary Bass is also the author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissenger and a Forgotten Genocide (Vintage: 2014), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and won the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations, among other awards. He is the William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War at Princeton University. His previous books are Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group: 2008) and Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton University Press: 2002). A former reporter for The Economist, Bass writes often for The New York Times and has written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and other publications. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Including its review of Judgment at Tokyo. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India (U Massachusetts Press, 2024) is a timely book on the history of print culture and the creation of publics in postcolonial South Asia. During the two difficult decades immediately following the 1947 Indian Independence, a new, commercially successful print culture emerged that articulated alternatives to dominant national narratives. Through what Aakriti Mandhwani defines as middlebrow magazines--like Delhi Press's Saritā--and the first paperbacks in Hindi--Hind Pocket Books--North Indian middle classes cultivated new reading practices that allowed them to reimagine what it meant to be a citizen. Rather than focusing on individual sacrifices and contributions to national growth, this new print culture promoted personal pleasure and other narratives that enabled readers to carve roles outside of official prescriptions of nationalism, austerity, and religion. Utilizing a wealth of previously unexamined print culture materials, as well as paying careful attention to the production of commercial publishing companies and the reception of ordinary reading practices--particularly those of women--Everyday Reading offers fresh perspectives into book history, South Asian literary studies, and South Asian gender studies. Aakriti Mandhwani is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. She is interested in book and magazine history, cultural studies, popular literature, South Asian and Hindi Literature, literary history and the history of libraries in South Asia. Her previous publications include Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity and journal articles on Hindi archives, language mixing and Hindi pulp fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The UAW's Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants (IRL Press, 2023) is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants (Daimler-Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volkswagen) in the American South since 1989, an era when union membership declined precipitously. Stephen J. Silvia chronicles transnational union cooperation between the UAW and its counterparts in Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan and documents the development of employer strategies that have proven increasingly effective at thwarting unionization. Silvia shows that when organizing, unions must now fight on three fronts: at the worksite; in the corporate boardroom; and in the political realm. The UAW's Southern Gamble makes clear that the UAW's failed campaigns in the South can teach hard-won lessons about challenging the structural and legal roadblocks to union participation and effectively organizing workers within and beyond the auto industry. Stephen J. Silvia is a Professor at American University's School of International Service, where he teaches international economics, international trade relations, and comparative politics. He is the author of Holding the Shop Together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Renowned Asia expert Michael Auslin is pivoting from Asia instead of towards it: today, he joins Madison's Notes to discuss his new project on the history of Washington, D.C., which, like ancient Rome or Victorian London, is a world capital of a nation at the height of its power. He explores the city's development from its early days to its role during pivotal moments in American history, including the Civil War and the Cold War, building on the research he shares in his Substack The Patowmack Packet. Dr. Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is the author of six books, including Asia's New Geopolitics and The End of the Asian Century, as well as the host of The Pacific Century podcast. Previously, he was an associate professor of history at Yale University, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. He is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the senior advisor for Asia at the Halifax International Security Forum, a senior fellow at London’s Policy Exchange, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Informed Western understanding of Imperial Japan still often conjures up images of militarism, blind devotion to leaders, and fanatical pride in the country. But, as Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War: The Collapse of an Empire (Bloomsbury, 2020)reveals, Western imagination is often reductive in its explanation of the Japanese Empire and its collapse. In his analysis of the Emperor, Imperial Japanese Army and Navy during the Second World War, Peter Wetzler examines the disconnect between nation and state during wartime Japan and in doing so offers a much-needed nuanced and sensitive corrective to existing Western scholarship. Rooted in the perspective of the Japanese, Wetzler makes available to readers vital primary and secondary Japanese archival sources; most notably, this book provides the first English assessment of the recently-released Actual Record of the Showa Emperor. This book is an important advance in English-language studies of the Second World War in Asia, and is thus essential reading for all those wishing to understand this crucial period in Japanese history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

David S. Richeson's book Tales of Impossibility: The 2000-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2019) is the fascinating story of the 2000 year quest to solve four of the most perplexing problems of antiquity: squaring the circle, duplicating the cube, trisecting the angle, and constructing regular polygons. The eventual conclusion was that all four of these problems could not be solved under the conditions laid out millennia ago. But it's also an engaging tale of some of the greatest mathematicians, and some not-so-well known ones, who met the challenge and moved mathematics forward in ways that the Greek geometers could never have envisioned. Even if you never read a single proof through to its conclusion, you'll enjoy the many entertaining side trips into a geometry far beyond what you learned in high school. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2024), editor Bodie Ashton compiles twelve essays exploring the impact of Pet Shop Boys across the past four decades. The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal 'gay band', it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike.  Covering the full oeuvre of The Pet Shop boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in this collection show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Politics of Naming the Armenian Genocide: Language, History and 'Medz Yeghern' (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores the genealogy of the concept of 'Medz Yeghern' ('Great Crime'), the Armenian term for the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Armenian ethno-religious group in the Ottoman Empire between the years 1915-1923.  Widely accepted by historians as one of the classical cases of genocide in the 20th century, ascribing the right definition to the crime has been a source of contention and controversy in international politics. Vartan Matiossian here draws upon extensive research based on Armenian sources, neglected in much of the current historiography, as well as other European languages in order to trace the development of the concepts pertaining to mass killing and genocide of Armenians from the ancient to the modern periods. Beginning with an analysis of the term itself, he shows how the politics of its use evolved as Armenians struggled for international recognition of the crime after 1945, in the face of Turkish protest. Taking a combined historical, philological, literary and political perspective, the book is an insightful exploration of the politics of naming a catastrophic historical event, and the competitive nature of national collective memories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is the concluding text in political theorist Eileen M. Hunt’s trilogy of books focusing on the work of Mary Shelley. All three books have been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and they weave together Shelley’s novels (Frankenstein, The Last Man) and her short stories, as well as her journals and other writings. Hunt is currently continuing her work on Shelley by annotating Shelley’s The Last Man and her Journal of Sorrow, both of which were written side by side in the mid-1820s. Hunt’s writing of The First Last Man reflects Shelley’s own approach to writing, which integrates her own experiences into her imagined universes to explore humanity and our thinking. Thus, The First Last Man is a pivotal analysis of Shelley’s iconic work of plague fiction or pandemic novels and Hunt researched and wrote the book during our contemporary experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. While Shelley’s Frankenstein may loom large in the background of The Last Man, the focus of the novel is on the legacy of disease, of mass death, of war and conflict, and how to move forward in a destroyed world. Hunt’s thesis about postapocalyptic literature, especially Shelley’s work in this regard, is that the thread of hope that comes through all of this death and destruction is what sustains us as humans. And this is also what sustained Shelley in the face of her own tragedies, which included the loss of a number of her own children, the tragic drowning death of her beloved husband, and the loss of other family members. For Shelley, plague was a metaphor for her, both literally and figuratively having to contend with all of these experiences that were outside of her control. Hunt explains that Shelley’s pandemic novel is well positioned within the extended literature that focuses on plagues and pandemics. Shelley is deeply read—in literature, political theory, the Bible, classical work, and the like—and her work reflects these various genres and the ways in which they wrestle with the ideas of apocalypses and what happens after such destructive events. But Shelley’s work is not just situated among these writings on plagues; she actually creates a new form of this kind of work that brings in love and hope while opening up new vistas and beginnings, compelling people to think about what happens in the aftermath of plagues or pandemics. This leads us to post-apocalyptic thinking, compelling the focus on what happens next. Hunt suggests that Mary Shelley is a kind of modern-day Sophocles, a great tragic thinker who helps guide our wrestling with these more eternal questions and does so through fictional prose creations. Such creations push on our imaginations and compel us to think about worlds that may be different than our own, but certainly reflects back our very existences. The First Last Man is a beautiful book, weaving together Mary Shelley’s work, her journals and personal experiences, and commentary on her work at the time of the publications. Into this, Hunt brings some of her own journal entries from her research excursions during the Covid pandemic, and her own experiences with tragedy in her own life, honoring Shelley’s many skills as a writer in so many different genres and capacities. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The system of educational apartheid that existed in the United States until the Brown v. Board of Education decision and its aftermath has affected every aspect of life for Black Americans. Larry Roeder and Barry Harrelson's book Dirt Don't Burn: A Black Community's Struggle for Educational Equality Under Segregation (Georgetown UP, 2023) is the riveting narrative of an extraordinary community that overcame the cultural and legal hurdles of systematic racism. Dirt Don't Burn describes how Loudoun County, Virginia, which once denied educational opportunity to Black Americans, gradually increased the equality of education for all children in the area. The book includes powerful stories of the largely unknown individuals and organizations that brought change to enduring habits of exclusion and prejudice toward African Americans. Dirt Don't Burn sheds new light on the history of segregation and inequity in American history. It provides new historical details and insights into African American experiences based on original research through thousands of previously lost records, archival NAACP files, and records of educational philanthropies. This book will appeal to readers interested in American history, African American history, and regional history, as well as educational policy and social justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Iran and Palestine: Past, Present and Future (Routledge, 2019), Seyed Ali Alavi (SOAS University of London) surveys the history of the relationship between Iran – and especially the Islamic Republic of Iran - with Palestinian organisations and leadership. It also, quite obviously, deals with Iranian views of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Analysing the connections of the Iranian revolutionary movements, both the Left and the Islamic camps’ perspectives are scrutinized. To provide a historical background to the post-revolutionary period, the genealogy of pro-Palestinian sentiments before 1979 are traced additionally. Demonstrating the pro-Palestinian stance of post-revolutionary Iran, the study focuses on the causes of roots of the ideological outlook and the interest of the state. Despite a growing body of literature on the Iranian Revolution and its impacts on the region, Iran’s connection with Palestine have been overlooked. This new volume fills the gap in the literature and enables readers to unpack the history of the two states. This unique and comprehensive coverage of Iran and Palestine’s relationship is a key resource for scholars and students interested in international relations, politics, Islamic and Middle East studies. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

This episode, we talk with Jennifer Lynn Stoever–editor of the influential sound studies blog Sounding Out!–about her new book, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016). We tend to think of race and racism as visual phenomena, but Stoever challenges white listeners to examine how racism can infect our ears, altering the sound of the world and other people. We discuss the history of American prejudicial listening since slavery and learn how African American writers and musicians have pushed back against this invisible “sonic color line.” Works discussed include Richard Wright’s Native Son and music by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly), Fishbone, and Lena Horne. Additional music by Graeme Gibson and Blue the Fifth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

"The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews." -Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943. Shortly after the occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939, the Germans created the Blue Police, consisting mainly of prewar Polish police officers. Within a short time, this police force was responsible for enforcing many anti-Jewish regulations issued by the Nazis. Who were these policemen, and how did they transform from ordinary policemen to murderous executioners? And what was the role of the Germans in this horrifying picture? In On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust (Yad Vashem, 2024) addresses these questions and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U. S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2020) explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them. By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, Walker shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power. This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in places as diverse as Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Washington, DC. Principles in Power tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, Walker explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy. Jo Butterfield is the Advisor for the Human Rights Certificate offered by the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights and is an Adjunct Asst. Professor with the UI Department of History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

‘The result is that, at the present time, the world is at an impasse.’ In 1956, Aimé Césaire pronounced the world to be at an impasse while renouncing his allegiance to the French Communist Party. In Jesse McCarthy’s The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (U Chicago Press, 2024), this foreclosure of ideological avenues, this loss of belief in the prevailing modes of political praxis restricts and overdetermines the scope of writing and possibilities of culture during the Cold War. Although this story of Cold War disillusionment may sound familiar to readers of Mark Grief’s The Age of the Crisis of Man (2015) and Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism (2016), McCarthy argues that black writers such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant, Paule Marshall, and Gwendolyn Brooks variously dissented from these delimitations in the name of alternate, unappeasable, quiet and disquieting bids for freedom. Across detailed chapters spanning from 1945 to 1965, the year in which Malcom X was assassinated and Amiri Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School by Amiri Baraka, McCarthy unfurls these writers’ efforts to work through negative experiences—alienation, dehiscence, dissolution, disaffiliation, disidentification—in order to, in Baldwin’s words, find ‘the power that will free us from ourselves.’ Jesse McCarthy is an essayist, novelist, editor at Point Magazine, and an assistant professor in English and African-American Studies at Harvard University. Damian Maher is a fellow by examination at All Souls College, University of Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The U.S. Senate is so sharply polarized along partisan and ideological lines today that it's easy to believe it was always this way. But in the turbulent 1960s, even as battles over civil rights and the war in Vietnam dominated American politics, bipartisanship often prevailed. One key reason: two remarkable leaders who remain giants of the Senate--Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois and Democratic leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, the longest-serving majority leader in Senate history, so revered for his integrity, fairness, and modesty that the late Washington Post reporter David Broder called him "the greatest American I ever met." The political and personal relationship of these party leaders, extraordinary by today's standards, is the lens through which Marc C. Johnson examines in Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate (U Oklahoma Press, 2023). Working together, with the Democrat often ceding public leadership to his Republican counterpart, Mansfield and Dirksen passed landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation, created Medicare, and helped bring about a foundational nuclear arms limitation treaty. The two leaders could not have been more different in personality and style: Mansfield, a laconic, soft-spoken, almost shy college history professor, and Dirksen, an aspiring actor known for his flamboyance and sense of humor, dubbed the "Wizard of Ooze" by reporters. Drawing on extensive Senate archives, Johnson explores the congressional careers of these iconic leaders, their intimate relationships with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and their own close professional friendship based on respect, candor, and mutual affection. A study of politics but also an analysis of different approaches to leadership, this is a portrait of a U.S. Senate that no longer exists--one in which two leaders, while exercising partisan political responsibilities, could still come together to pass groundbreaking legislation--and a reminder of what is possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism (SUNY Press, 2023), Adi Mahalel presents Yiddish and Hebrew writer I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) in a new radical light we've never seen him in before. Conceived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the 2011/12 Occupy Wall Street movement and social protests in Israel/Palestine, and against the backdrop of the Bernie Sander's campaigns in the United States, Mahalel revisits the radical period of the 1890s and recasts Peretz as an "organic intellectual" (Antonio Gramsci) of the Eastern European Jewish working class complementing the political work of the incipient socialist, diaspora nationalist movement of the Jewish Labor Bund. By offering close readings of the "radical" Peretz in Yiddish and Hebrew and following a partly chronological, partly thematic scheme, this study traces Peretz's radicalism from its inception through the various ways in which it was synchronically expressed during this intense period of history. It shows how this writer-cum-activist became instrumental in the realm of culture in the rise of ethno-class-consciousness among the Eastern European Jewish working class at the turn century. Adi Mahalel received his doctoral degree in Hebrew and Yiddish Studies at Columbia University and is Visiting Assistant Professor of Yiddish Studies. His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as AJS REVIEW, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Israel Studies Review, and Kesher: Journal of Media and Communications History in Israel and the Jewish World. Mahalel was a culture columnist at the Yiddish Forward. Miriam Chorley-Schulz is an Assistant Professor and Mokin Fellow of Holocaust Studies at the University of Oregon and the co-founder of the EU-funded project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present. She holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and was the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre of Jewish Studies and the Centre of Transnational and Diaspora Studies at the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024) is an experimental biography of the ceramics entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood that reveals the tenuous relationship of eighteenth-century England to late-capitalist modernity. It traces the multiple strands in the life of the ceramic entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795) to propose an alternative view of eighteenth-century England's tenuous relationship to our own lives and times, amid the ruins of late-capitalist modernity. Through intimate vignettes and essays, and in writing at turns funny, sharp, and pensive, Iris Moon chips away at the mythic image of Wedgwood as singular genius, business titan, and benevolent abolitionist, revealing an amorphous, fragile, and perhaps even shattered life. In the process the book goes so far as to dismantle certain entrenched social and economic assumptions, not least that the foundational myths of capitalism might not be quite so rosy after all, and instead induce a feeling that could only be characterized as blue. Iris Moon is Associate Curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the author of Luxury after the Terror and coeditor with Richard Taws of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France. She teaches at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Rachel Pafe is a writer and researcher interested in modern Jewish thought, critical theories of mourning, and the boundaries of biographical writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Rebuilding Story Worlds: The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters (Rutgers UP, 2020) examines The Obscure Cities, one of the few comics series to achieve massive popularity while remaining highly experimental in form and content. Set in a parallel world, full of architecturally distinctive city-states, The Obscure Cities also represents one of the most impressive pieces of world-building in any form of literature. Rebuilding Story Worlds offers the first full-length study of this seminal series, exploring both the artistic traditions from which it emerges and the innovative ways it plays with genre, gender, and urban space. Comics scholar Jan Baetens examines how Schuiten’s work as an architectural designer informs the series’ concerns with the preservation of historic buildings. He also includes an original interview with Peeters, which reveals how poststructuralist critical theory influenced their construction of a rhizomatic fictional world, one which has made space for fan contributions through the Alta Plana website. Synthesizing cutting-edge approaches from both literary and visual studies, Rebuilding Story Worlds will give readers a new appreciation for both the aesthetic ingenuity of The Obscure Cities and its nuanced conception of politics. Jan Baetens is a Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Arts of the KU Leuven. His main research interests and areas of expertise include: contemporary French poetry and popular culture (among many other topics). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

During the Second World War, Mennonites in the Netherlands, Germany, occupied Poland, and Ukraine lived in communities with Jews and close to various Nazi camps and killing sites. As a result of this proximity, Mennonites were neighbours to and witnessed the destruction of European Jews. In some cases they were beneficiaries or even enablers of the Holocaust. Much of this history was forgotten after the war, as Mennonites sought to rebuild or find new homes as refugees. The result was a myth of Mennonite innocence and ignorance that connected their own suffering during the 1930s and 1940s with earlier centuries of persecution and marginalization. European Mennonites and the Holocaust (U Toronto Press, 2021) identifies a significant number of Mennonite perpetrators, along with a smaller number of Mennonites who helped Jews survive, examining the context in which they acted. In some cases, theology led them to accept or reject Nazi ideals. In others, Mennonites chose a closer embrace of German identity as a strategy to improve their standing with Germans or for material benefit. A powerful and unflinching examination of a difficult history, European Mennonites and the Holocaust uncovers a more complete picture of Mennonite life in these years, underscoring actions that were not always innocent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The crusade movement needed women: their money, their prayer support, their active participation, and their inspiration. Helen J. Nicholson's book Women and the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2023) surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570, when the last crusader state, Cyprus, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. It considers women's actions not only on crusade battlefields but also in recruiting crusaders, supporting crusades through patronage, propaganda, and prayer, and as both defenders and aggressors. It argues that medieval women were deeply involved in the crusades but the roles that they could play and how their contemporaries recorded their deeds were dictated by social convention and cultural expectations. Although its main focus is the women of Latin Christendom, it also looks at the impact of the crusades and crusaders on the Jews of western Europe and the Muslims of the Middle East, and compares relations between Latin Christians and Muslims with relations between Muslims and other Christian groups. Helen J. Nicholson is Professor of Medieval History at Cardiff University, UK. She has published extensively on the crusades, the military orders, and various related subjects, including a translation of a chronicle of the Third Crusade and an edition of the Templar trial proceedings in Britain and Ireland. She has just completed a history of Queen Sybil of Jerusalem (1186-1190). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The scientific method that aspiring social scientists are taught in graduate school seems pretty straightforward: you start with a hypothesis, figure our how you’re going to operationalize and measure your variables, pick cases that provide a tough test of your hypothesis, then collect your data, analyze it, and report your findings. However, for comparative-historical social scientists, things are rarely so cut-and-dried: it takes a lot of ‘soaking and poking’ before you can answer relatively straightforward questions like “what is this a case of?” and “what is your dependent variable?” Moreover, the entire idea of trying to impose a template developed for experimental studies on comparative and historical data by arbitrarily slicing an integrated reality up into variables and trying to isolate one-directional causal effects doesn’t seem appropriate for the dynamism and complexity of social reality. Today, I’m talking to the Nicholas Hoover Wilson and Damon Mayrl, the editors of a new edited volume that charts a different path. The contributors to After Positivism: New Approaches to Comparison in Historical Sociology (Columbia UP, 2024) provide new ways of thinking about the purposes of comparison in historical social science, what the ‘units’ of historical analysis are, and how historically-oriented social scientists should go about conducting comparisons. Nicholas Wilson is an associate professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, and the author of Modernity’s Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India (Columbia 2023). Damon Mayrl is associate professor of sociology at Colby College, and the author of Secular Conversions: Political Institutions and Religious Education in the United States and Australia, 1800-2000. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Adam Zientek, Assistant Professor of History at UC Davis joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). Beginning in the fall of 1914, every French soldier on the Western Front received a daily ration of wine from the army. At first it was a modest quarter litre, but by 1917 it had increased to the equivalent of a full bottle each day. The wine ration was intended to sustain morale in the trenches, making the men more willing to endure suffering and boredom. The army also supplied soldiers with doses of distilled alcohol just before attacks to increase their ferocity and fearlessness. This strategic distribution of alcohol was a defining feature of French soldiers’ experiences of the war and amounted to an experimental policy of intoxicating soldiers for military ends. A Thirst for Wine and War explores the French army’s emotional and behavioral conditioning of soldiers through the distribution of a mind-altering drug that was later hailed as one of the army’s “fathers of victory.” The daily wine ration arose from an unexpected set of factors including the demoralization of trench warfare, the wine industry’s fear of losing its main consumers, and medical consensus about the benefits of wine drinking. The army’s related practice of distributing distilled alcohol to embolden soldiers was a double-edged sword, as the men might become unruly. The army implemented regulations and surveillance networks to curb men’s drinking behind the lines, in an attempt to ensure they only drank when it was useful to the war effort. When morale collapsed in spring 1917, the army lost control of this precarious system as drunken soldiers mutinied in the thousands. Discipline was restored only when the army regained command of soldiers’ alcohol consumption. Drawing on a range of archives, personal narratives, and trench journals, A Thirst for Wine and War shows how the French army’s intoxication of its soldiers constituted a unique exercise of biopower deployed on a mass scale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Professor David Bonagura, theologian and Latinist, has translated and edited seven of St. Jerome’s letters dealing with death and mourning. This doctor of the church consoles his friends in first centuries of Christendom, describing death as sleep, and dying as our journey back home to God. And though the Mediterranean is big and fourth-century travel was slow, we see that the Christian community is surprisingly close. The letters also reveal some of the material history and mentalities of daily life which allow us a priceless glimpse across the centuries. Professor Bonagura’s website. Professor Bonagura’s book Jerome's Tears: Letters to Friends in Mourning (Sophia International Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Jane Hamlett & Dr. Julie-Marie Strange tracks the British love affair with pets over the last two centuries, showing how the kinds of pets we keep, as well as how we relate to and care for them, has changed radically. The book describes the growth of pet foods and medicines, the rise of pet shops, and the development of veterinary care, creating the pet economy. Most importantly, pets have played a powerful emotional role in families across all social classes, creating new kinds of relationships and home lives. For the first time, through a history of companion animals and the humans who lived with them, this book puts the story of the ‘pet revolution’ alongside other revolutions – industrial, agricultural, political – to highlight how animals contributed to modern British life. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Xuanzang (600/602–664) was one of the most accomplished and consequential monks in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Celebrated for his sixteen-year pilgrimage from China to India, his transmission and translation of hundreds of Buddhist texts, and his training of a generation of masters in China, Korea, and Japan, Xuanzang’s life and legacy are the stuff of legend. In the centuries after his death, stories of his epic adventures and extraordinary accomplishments circulated in texts, images, songs, and plays. These mythic accounts recast the erudite pilgrim, translator, and court cleric as a magical monk who traveled not between China and India but between heaven and earth. Beset by bloodthirsty demons, this deified version of Xuanzang navigates the perilous paths of the netherworld to reach a pure land in the west. His purpose is to acquire a cache of sacred scriptures with the power to safeguard the living and deliver the dead. Along the way, he is guided and protected by a mischievous monkey, a lazy pig, a demonic monk, and a dragon horse. This imaginative and compelling tale received its fullest and most influential treatment in the famous sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West.  In this engaging exploration of the confluence of myth, narrative, and ritual, Benjamin Brose uncovers the hidden histories of Xuanzang’s many afterlives. Beginning in the eleventh century and continuing to the present day, devotees have summoned Xuanzang and his band of misfit pilgrims to perform exorcisms, guide the spirits of the dead, and possess the bodies of insurgents. Embodying Xuanzang: The Postmortem Travels of a Buddhist Pilgrim (U Hawaii Press, 2023) traces the postmortem travels of China’s greatest pilgrim and reveals the narrative and performative roots of China’s best-known novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Arjen F. Bakker's book The Secret of Time: Reconfiguring Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Brill, 2023) contributes to the rethinking of the Dead Sea Scrolls as an essential and integral part of Judaism in the Greco-Roman period. The Qumran manuscripts attest to the reconfiguration of Jewish wisdom concepts in this period. Strikingly, reflection on time as the organizing principle behind all of reality is formative for these emerging concepts, which are expressed by the enigmatic phrase rāz nihyeh. The secret of time invites us to venture beyond existing categorizations and explore a rich conceptual framework that is manifested across a wide range of texts, beyond generic categories, and overcoming the sectarian divide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In December 1937, Bernhard Sindberg arrives at a cement factory outside of Nanjing. He’s one of just two foreigners, and he gets there just weeks before the Japanese invade and commit the now infamous atrocities in the Chinese city. As the writer Peter Harmsen notes, Bernhard’s background isn’t particularly compelling: He’s bounced from job to job, and is known for butting heads with his colleagues and superiors. But as Harmsen explains in his book Bernhard Sindberg: The Schindler of Nanjing (Casemate: 2024), the Danish man ends up doing something extraordinary: Setting up a refugee camp and using every ounce of political capital and sheer bullheadedness to protect tens of thousands of Chinese trying to escape the fighting. In this interview, Peter and I talk about Bernhard, his less-than-illustrious path to China, and what his deeds in Nanjing tell us about the nature of heroism. Peter Harmsen is the author of Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Casemate: 2015) and Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City (Casemate: 2015), as well as the War in the Far East trilogy. He studied history at National Taiwan University and has been a foreign correspondent in East Asia for more than two decades. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bernhard Sindberg. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Mexican Americans have often fit uncertainly into the white/non-white binary that has goverens much of American history. After Colorado, and much of the rest of the American West, became American claimed territory after the Mexican-Americna War in 1848, thousands of formerly Mexican citizens became American citizens. Flash foward a century to post-war Denver. In the spring of 1969, Mexican American students staged a walk out in protest of poor quality education, racist teachers, and school segregation - they were met by police in riot gear, to beat and arrested dozens of peaceful protestors. Denver thus became ground zero for debates over race in the American West, a city as important to conceptions of whiteness, "minority" status, and colorblindness as any place in the South. In the award winning book, Racial Uncertainties: Mexican Americans, School Desegregation, and the Making of Race in Post-Civil Rights America (U California Press, 2022), University of Utah historian Danielle Olden tracks the history of Chicano, Latinx, and Mexican American identities through Denver's history, focusing on the lead up to the 1973 Supreme Court case, Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1. Olden tracks the remarkable and complicated story of that city's Chicano, Black, and white communities through the halting process of school desegregation, and in doing so provides an explemary lesson in the social mutability of the concept of race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968 (Encounter, 2023) is the long-awaited sequel to the immensely influential Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Like its predecessor, this book overturns the conventional wisdom using a treasure trove of new sources, many of them from the North Vietnamese side. Rejecting the standard depiction of U.S. military intervention as a hopeless folly, it shows America's war to have been a strategic necessity that could have ended victoriously had President Lyndon Johnson heeded the advice of his generals. In light of Johnson's refusal to use American ground forces beyond South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland employed the best military strategy available. Once the White House loosened the restraints on Operation Rolling Thunder, American bombing inflicted far greater damage on the North Vietnamese supply system than has been previously understood, and it nearly compelled North Vietnam to capitulate.  The book demonstrates that American military operations enabled the South Vietnamese government to recover from the massive instability that followed the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. American culture sustained public support for the war through the end of 1968, giving South Vietnam realistic hopes for long-term survival. America's defense of South Vietnam averted the imminent fall of key Asian nations to Communism and sowed strife inside the Communist camp, to the long-term detriment of America's great-power rivals, China and the Soviet Union. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strip (Ohio State UP, 2024) is the first full-length study of US comic strips from the period prior to the rise of Sunday newspaper comics. Where current histories assume that nineteenth-century US comics consisted solely of single-panel political cartoons or simple “proto-comics,” Lost Literacies introduces readers to an ambitious group of artists and editors who were intent on experimenting with the storytelling possibilities of the sequential strip, resulting in playful comics whose existence upends prevailing narratives about the evolution of comic strips. Over the course of the nineteenth century, figures such as artist Frank Bellew and editor T. W. Strong introduced sequential comic strips into humor magazines and precursors to graphic novels known as “graphic albums.” These early works reached audiences in the tens of thousands. Their influences ranged from Walt Whitman’s poetry to Mark Twain’s travel writings to the bawdy stage comedies of the Bowery Theatre. Most importantly, they featured new approaches to graphic storytelling that went far beyond the speech bubbles and panel grids familiar to us today. As readers of Lost Literacies will see, these little-known early US comic strips rival even the most innovative modern comics for their diversity and ambition. Alex Beringer is a professor of English at the University of Montevallo. His research and teaching focuses on nineteenth century American literature, visual culture, and comics. He received his Ph.D. in English in 2011 from the University of Michigan and has held fellowships with the American Antiquarian Society, University of Cambridge and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His work has appeared in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, PopMatters.com, and elsewhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Omar Valerio-Jiménez's book Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship (UNC Press, 2024) analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles over several generations. As the first Latinx people incorporated into the nation, Mexican Americans were offered US citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act declared whites solely eligible for citizenship, the treaty pronounced Mexican Americans to be legally white. While their incorporation as citizens appeared as progress towards racial justice and the electorate's diversification, their second-class citizenship demonstrated a retrenchment in racial progress. Over several generations, civil rights activists summoned conquest memories to link Mexican Americans' poverty, electoral disenfranchisement, low educational attainment, and health disparities to structural and institutional inequalities resulting from racial retrenchments. Activists also recalled the treaty's citizenship guarantees to push for property rights, protection from vigilante attacks, and educational reform. Omar Valerio-Jiménez addresses the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts. The book also examines collective memories in the US and Mexico to illustrate transnational influences on Mexican Americans and to demonstrate how community and national memories can be used strategically to advance political agendas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history. In Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia UP, 2024), Laura E. Helton tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south. Helton chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Drawing on overlooked sources such as book lists and card catalogs, she reveals the risks collectors took to create Black archives. This book also explores the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, Virginia. In each case, Helton argues, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment, creative abundance, and political possibility. Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Nick Underwood's Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar Paris (Indiana University Press, 2022) is a captivating study of the culture and politics of the vibrant community of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Making their way to the French capital from various sites in Eastern Europe, members of this Jewish community developed their own cultural institutions, including theatre companies, musical groups, and choruses. Left-leaning in their politics, these newly French Jews typically understood their cultural and community work as expressions of a Socialist or Communist politics. This political orientation also drew non-Yiddish-speaking and non-Jewish audiences to the work of these organizations and artists, establishing forms of solidarity across cultural and religious groups and classes, in Yiddish and in French.  Throughout the book, Underwood examines closely the history of key cultural organizations that brought Yiddish speakers in Paris together and worked to disseminate Yiddish language and culture throughout a wider community in France. Understanding their efforts as profoundly modern, even avant-garde, these cultural and political actors forged and expressed a Jewish diaspora nationalism they regarded as compatible with French republicanism. France was a space of multicultural possibility that seemed the perfect place to build the future.  Taking the reader through the work of various figures and groups, Underwood follows the solidarity, performances, and pluralism of the Yiddish community in interwar Paris up to the eve of the Second World War. Attentive to the devastating experiences that awaited so many French and European Jews after 1939, the book remains focused on the present of the interwar period throughout, emphasizing the community's hopes for an inclusive French society respectful of forms of religious, racial, cultural, and linguistic difference. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials the author pursued in sites in multiple countries, the book includes some very real and moving stories. Apart from the historical actors Underwood sought out directly and through family members, the lives and experiences of so many actors, singers, musicians, and engaged community members spring off many of the book's pages. It's a compelling book that will be of great interest to scholars across subfields and disciplines, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke UP, 2023), Anjali Arondekar refuses the historical common sense that archival loss is foundational to a subaltern history of sexuality, and that the deficit of our minoritized pasts can be redeemed through acquisitions of lost pasts. Instead, Arondekar theorizes the radical abundance of sexuality through the archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj—a caste-oppressed devadasi collective in South Asia—that are plentiful and quotidian, imaginative and ordinary. For Arondekar, abundance is inextricably linked to the histories of subordinated groups in ways that challenge narratives of their constant devaluation. Summoning abundance over loss upends settled genealogies of historical recuperation and representation and works against the imperative to fix sexuality within wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and precarity. Multigeneric and multilingual, transregional and historically supple, Abundance centers sexuality within area, post/colonial, and anti/caste histories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the second volume of The Weight of Words Series, In Fielding's Wake (St. Augustine's Press, 2022), Jeremy Black continues his efforts to present and preserve Britain's literary genius. Its intelligence and enduring influence is in large part reliant on the underlining conservatism that has motivated authors such as Agatha Christie (Black's earlier subject) and Henry Fielding alike. Fielding's epic comic novel, Tom Jones, is unforgettable for many reasons, but the author must be credited with an aptitude for documenting contemporary cultural history and his contribution to a new species of writing. Black's treatment of Fielding draws to the fore a man who was of his time but not confined to it. "Philosophy in practice encompassed his stance as a man of action as well as a reflective writer of genius." Fielding is shown to provide across the breadth of his work extensive and invaluable commentary on issues as diverse as law and order, marriage, women, and the interplay of urban and rural life. Black, an historian, is here a student of storytelling and recovers Fielding's rich descriptions of the human heart and call to defy the vices with which circumstances might taunt it. Black has done a service along many fronts at once: the science of the novel and genre, the history of a people and the figure of a memorable writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

This volume proposes a method for reading Milton's De Doctrina Christiana as an artifact of his process of theological thinking rather than as a repository of his doctrinal views. Jason A. Kerr argues that reading in this way involves attention to the complex material state of the manuscript along with Milton's varying modes of engagement with scripture and various theological interlocutors, and reveals that Milton's approach to theology underwent significant change in the course of his work on the treatise. Initially, Milton set out to use Ramist logic to organize scripture in a way that drew out its intrinsic doctrinal structure. This method had two unintended consequences: it drove Milton to an antitrinitarian understanding of the Son of God, and it obliged him to reflect on his own authority as an interpreter and to develop an ecclesiology capable of sifting divine truth from human error. Consequently, Milton's Theological Process: Reading de Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost (Oxford UP, 2023) explores the complex interplay between Milton's preconceived theological ideas and his willingness to change his mind as it develops through the layers of revision in the manuscript. Kerr concludes by considering Paradise Lost as a vehicle for Milton's further reflection on the foundations of theology--and by showing how even the epic presents challenges to the fruits of these reflections. Reading Milton theologically means more than working to ascertain his doctrinal views; it means attending critically to his messy process of evaluating and rethinking the doctrinal views to which his prior study had led him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1941 and 1942 the British and Indian Armies were brutally defeated and Japan reigned supreme in its newly conquered territories throughout Asia. But change was coming. New commanders were appointed, significant training together with restructuring took place, and new tactics were developed.  A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma, and Britain: 1941–45 (Osprey, 2021) by acclaimed historian Robert Lyman expertly records these coordinated efforts and describes how a new volunteer Indian Army, rising from the ashes of defeat, would ferociously fight to turn the tide of war. But victory did not come immediately. It wasn't until March 1944, when the Japanese staged their famed 'March on Delhi', that the years of rebuilding paid off and, after bitter fighting, the Japanese were finally defeated at Kohima and Imphal. This was followed by a series of extraordinary victories culminating in Mandalay in May 1945 and the collapse of all Japanese forces in Burma. Until now, the Indian Army's contribution has been consistently forgotten and ignored by many Western historians but Robert Lyman proves how vital this hard-fought campaign was in securing Allied victory in the east. Detailing the defeat of Japanese militarism, he recounts how the map of the region was ultimately redrawn, guaranteeing the rise of an independent India free from the shackles of empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster enclaves while the cassette’s likeness pops up on T-shirts, coffee mugs, belt buckles, and cell phone cases. In Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable (Duke University Press, 2024), Dr. Rob Drew traces how a lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music and a source of cultural capital. Drawing on sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional hearings, Dr. Drew examines a moment in the early 1980s when music industry representatives argued that the cassette encouraged piracy. At the same time, 1980s indie rock culture used the cassette as a symbol to define itself as an outsider community. Indie’s love affair with the cassette culminated in the mixtape, which advanced indie’s image as a gift economy. By telling the cassette’s long and winding history, Dr. Drew demonstrates that sharing cassettes became an acceptable and meaningful mode of communication that initiated rituals of independent music recording, re-recording, and gifting. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Ryan Reft is a historian in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, where he oversees collections pertaining to 20th and 21st century domestic politics and policies. He received his PhD in U.S. urban history from the University of California San Diego in 2014, and his writing has appeared all over the place, from edited volumes to academic journals, to the Washington Post and Zocalo Public Square. He’s also currently the senior co-editor of the Urban History Association’s blog The Metropole, where he recently authored a great article called “Heroin and Chocolate City: Black Community Responses to Drug Addiction in the Nation’s Capital, 1967-1973.” While it’s not a book, “Heroin and Chocolate City” is a deeply-researched article that offers compelling new insights into how Washington, D.C., responded to heroin use in the late 60s and early 70s, when both D.C., and heroin, were really unique. *Note to listeners: Ryan realized later he connected Julius Hobson with SNCC. Hobson was actually associated with CORE. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Cyrus McCormick invented the revolutionary mechanical reaper in 1831...right? At least, that's how the story has been told for decades. In Harvesting History: McCormick's Reaper, Heritage Branding, and Historical Forgery (U Nebraska Press, 2023), National Park Service historian Daniel Ott argues that not only have textbooks and other sources of historical knowledge gotten this wrong, but that they've done so because of a massive PR campaign. Ott argues that McCormick, his family, and the company that bears his name, all engaged in a multi-decade long fight to convince potential buyers that their reaper was the first, and given the potentially millions of dollars at stake in a competitive farm implement marketplace, claiming so was no exercise in arcane trivia. In the late 19th and early 20th century. McCormick's company recruited salesmen, advertisers, and newly professionalized historians to shape a narrative about the reaper that sanded over the complex and contingent nature of its invention, and turned McCormick into an American hero. The history told by these groups was malleable enough to fit changing times, as populists and progressives came and went - the claim of "first" gave McCormick's reaper credibility its competitiors could never match. Harvesting History is a story about the importance of getting the story right, and why some people will go to great lengths to make sure we keep getting the story wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In a broken world, in which even God Himself is in a state of deep crisis, what is required in order to mend the rupture? How can one heal God and His world? Moreover, what might allow our actions to be effective? These questions stand at the heart of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the apex of the Safedian intellectual and religious renaissance of the sixteenth century, and one of the constituting phenomena of Modern Jewish thought.  God as Patient: The Medical Discourse of Lurianic Kabbalah (Magnes Press, 2023) presents medical discourse – the knowledge, language, and practice of medicine – as a significant key to our understanding of the Lurianic search for a way to mend reality, and first and foremost the Godhead. The book reads together the Lurianic texts alongside the medical writings of R. Hayyim Vital, R. Isaac Luria's chief disciple, and a medical practitioner. Consequently, the book analyzes how medicine becomes the model for the Lurianic language of action. In its final part, the book shows how God becomes in this Kabbalah the ultimate patient of the Lurianic Kabbalist, who in turn becomes the private court physician of the King of Kings, and needs, like every physician, the proper modes of healing to accomplish his task. Dr. Assaf Tamari studies Jewish intellectual history in the early modern eastern Mediterranean, focusing on the affinities between theology, science and political thought, especially in the literature of the Kabbalah. He is currently the deputy head of the Ben Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, and teaches at Tel Aviv University, Shalem College and Alma - a Home for Hebrew Culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language, which has just been reissued in paperback by Oxford University Press, with a new preface. The Rise of English charts the spread of English as the dominant lingua franca worldwide. The book explores the wide-ranging economic and political effects of English. It examines both the good and harm that English can cause as it increases economic opportunity for some but sidelines others. Overall, the book argues that English can function beneficially as a key component of multilingual ecologies worldwide. In the conversation, we explore how the dominance of English has become more contested since the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in higher education and global knowledge production. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (Princeton UP, 2024) traces the political history of American political parties, not so much as historical institutions with different constituents—though it does that—but as living and breathing entities that have, over the course of more than 200 years, been, at times, vitally engaged with politics. The role of parties in the political system is to work in an organized way to get control of government and to connect electoral actors with the power to do things within the governmental system. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld dive into all kinds of archival data and information to get at the records and comments of party stalwarts, not just presidents or elected officials often associated with the parties. They were looking to see how the folks who were inside the parties, or parts of the parties, thought about the parties themselves and their work in them. Some of this is well-trodden ground, but much of the political history in The Hollow Parties really fleshes out much more of the daily engagement among party members and how they made American political parties work and thus how they made American politics work. But part of the story is also that the parties did not and do not always work the same in tandem. In fact, according to the examples laced throughout the book, often times one party, say a dominant party like the Republican Party during and after the Civil War, or the Democratic Party in the post-war period, operated differently and was structured differently than its opposition. The underlying thesis of The Hollow Parties is that while the political parties at the moment, at this time of high polarization, may seem to be vessels of ideology antagonistic to stable democracy, in fact, we need parties to be vitally engaged in politics, as they have been in the past. Scholzman and Rosenfeld also note that the current polarized era has produced different outcomes in the ways the parties operate: for the Democrats, they become ineffectual; for the Republicans, they have become extremists. The Hollow Parties explains that it may currently feel as if the parties are hollow, especially on the Right where so many other entities have come into the space that had belonged to the party itself. But that the way to stem the crisis in democracy in the United States is for the parties to re-establish themselves as functional political institutions working with and in the formal components of the American political system. The Hollow Parties explains a kind of typology of how the parties in the United States operate and that at different times, each party has embodied different strands within this typology. This is a useful and important framework to consider how American political parties function and how these different strands aim towards different forms of operation and different goals. Finally, this book is beautifully written, marrying archival information with contemporary examples and whisking the reader along on a fascinating and revealing ride through American political development. The Hollow Parties focuses on American political parties but can’t help but enlighten the reader about American history and current political developments that are all directly connected to past party activities and political history. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

'A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.' So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of Parliament in 1853. His words – intended ironically in a debate about a rise in attacks on women – summed up the prevailing attitude of the day, in which violence against women was waved away as a part and parcel of modern living – a chilling seam of misogyny that had polluted both parliament and the law. But were things about to change? The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History (Mudlark, 2024) is a vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction. In it, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women whose cases became cornerstones of our modern legal system and shine a light on the historical inequalities of the law. We hear of the uniquely abusive marriage which culminated in the dramatic story of the ‘Clitheroe wife abduction’; of the domestic tragedies which changed the law on domestic violence; the controversies surrounding the Contagious Diseases Act and the women who campaigned to abolish it; and the real courtroom stories behind notorious murder cases such as the ‘Camden Town Murder’. Exploring the 19th- and early 20th Century legal history that influenced the modern-day stances on issues such as domestic abuse, sexual violence and divorce, The Walnut Tree lifts the lid on the shocking history of women under British law – and what it means for women today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories (Cambridge UP, 2023), Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. His compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are 'we' as we cite it?  This title is also available as Open Access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

People experience and comprehend time in different fashions in response to events occurring around them. The experience of time and the speed at which change is perceived to occur may alter during eras of crisis. Time can feel compressed for some and broad or flat for others. These comprehensions of time in turn give form to political views and provide impetus for actions in the political sphere. Political reforms may seem to fast and without foundation for some and not nearly fast enough for those desperately seeking change. Using French thinkers and activists of the radical left and right between the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War as a case study, Dr. Alexandra Paulin-Booth argues that time provides an important means of exploring how concepts such as nationalism, revolution, and social change were understood at the turn of the century.  In her latest work, Time and Radical Politics in France: from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (Manchester University Press, 2023) Dr. Paulin-Booth argues French political and intellectual figures differed in opinion as to whether a glorious future was within their grasp or perhaps the past promised salvation for the embattled French Third Republic. Professor Alexandra Paulin-Booth is a Postdoctoral Researcher & Academic Coordinator with Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Dr. Paulin-Booth completed her Masters degrees at Durham University before studying for Ph.D. in History at the University of Oxford. She has also taught at Balliol College, Oxford and Durham University. Rick Northrop is an undergraduate student of History in Calgary, Alberta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The history of rock and roll music can be seen in a long arc of Western civilization's struggle for both greater individual expression and societal stability. In the 1960s, the West's relationship with authority ruptured, in part due to the rock revolution. The lessons and implications of this era have yet to be fully grasped.  James A. Cosby's book Rock Music, Authority and Western Culture, 1964-1980 (McFarland, 2024) examines the key artists, music, and events of the classic rock era--defined here as 1964 to 1980--through a virtual psychoanalysis of the West. Over these years, important truths unfold in the stories of British Invaders, hippies, proto-punks, and more, as well as topics to include drugs, primal scream therapy, the occult, spirituality, and disco and its detractors, to name just a few. Through a narrative that is equal parts entertaining, scholarly, and even spiritual, readers will gain a greater appreciation for rock music, better understand the confusing world we live in today, and see how greater individuality and social stability may be better reconciled moving forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), the Lubavitcher Rebbe, took an insular Chasidic group that was almost decimated by the Holocaust and transformed it into one of the most influential and controversial forces in world Jewry.  Join us as we speak with Rabbi Chaim Miller about his biography of the Rebbe, Turning Judaism Outward (Kol Menachem, 2014), a superbly crafted biography that draws on recently uncovered documents and archives of personal correspondence, painting an exceptionally human and charming portrait of a man who was well known but little understood.  Rabbi Chaim Miller was educated at the Haberdashers’ Aske’s School in London, England and studied Medical Science at Leeds University. He published the best-selling Kol Menachem Chumash—Gutnick Edition, which made over a thousand complex discourses of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe easily accessible to the layman. His Lifestyle Books Torah, Five Books of Moses—Slager Edition was distributed to thousands of servicemen and women in the U.S. Army. In 2013, he was chosen by the Jewish Press as one of sixty “Movers and Shakers” in the Jewish world. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Chani and seven children. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution transformed Britain from an agricultural and artisanal economy to one dominated by industry, ushering in unprecedented growth in technology and trade and putting the country at the center of the global economy. But the commonly accepted story of the industrial revolution, anchored in images of cotton factories and steam engines invented by unfettered geniuses, overlooks the true root of economic and industrial expansion: the lucrative military contracting that enabled the country's near-constant state of war in the eighteenth century. Demand for the guns and other war materiel that allowed British armies, navies, mercenaries, traders, settlers, and adventurers to conquer an immense share of the globe in turn drove the rise of innumerable associated industries, from metalworking to banking. Bookended by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2019) traces the social and material life of British guns over a century of near-constant war and violence at home and abroad. Priya Satia develops this story through the life of prominent British gun-maker and Quaker Samuel Galton Jr., who was asked to answer for the moral defensibility of producing guns as new uses like anonymous mass violence rose. Reconciling the pacifist tenet of his faith with his perception of the economic realities of the time, Galton argued that war was driving the industrial economy, making everyone inescapably complicit in it. Through his story, Satia illuminates Britain's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the government's role in economic development, and the origins of our own era's debates over gun control and military contracting. Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of British History at Stanford University. She is the author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (2009), and her writing has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, the Nation, and the Huffington Post, among other publications. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What is the relationship between seapower, law, and strategy? In Balancing Strategy: Seapower, Neutrality, and Prize-Law in the Seven Years' War (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Anna Brinkman uses in-depth analysis of cases brought before the Court of Prize Appeal during the Seven Years' War to explore how Britain worked to shape maritime international law to its strategic advantage. Within the court, government officials and naval and legal minds came together to shape legal decisions from the perspectives of both legal philosophy and maritime strategic aims. As a result, neutrality and the negotiation of rights became critical to maritime warfare. Balancing Strategy unpicks a complex web of competing priorities: deals struck with the Dutch Republic and Spain; imperial rivalry; mercantilism; colonial trade; and the relationships between metropoles and colonies, trade, and the navy. Ultimately, influencing and shaping international law of the sea allows a nation to create the norms and rules that constrain or enable the use of seapower during war. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

When suffragette Emily Wilding Davison hid overnight in the Houses of Parliament in 1911 to have her name recorded in the census there, she may not have known that there were sixty-seven other women also resident in Parliament that night: housekeepers, kitchen maids, domestic servants, and wives and daughters living in households. Necessary Women: the Untold Story of Parliament's Working Women (The History Press, 2023) is their story. Women have touched just about every aspect of life in Parliament. From ‘Jane’, dispenser of beer, pies and chops in Bellamy’s legendary refreshment rooms; to Eliza Arscot, who went from reigning as Principal Housemaid at the House of Lords to Hanwell Asylum; to May Ashworth, Official Typist to Parliament for thirty years through marriage, war and divorce; and Jean Winder, the first female Hansard reporter, who fought for years to be paid the same as her male counterparts; the lives of these women have been largely unacknowledged – until now. Drawing on new research from the Parliamentary Archives, government records and family history sources, historians and parliamentary insiders Dr. Mari Takayanagi and Dr. Elizabeth Hallam Smith bring these unsung heroes to life. They chart the changing context for working women within and beyond the Palace of Westminster, uncovering women left out of the history books – including Mary Jane Anderson, a previously unknown suffragette. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Indoctrinating the Youth: Secondary Education in Wartime China and Postwar Taiwan, 1937-1960 (U Hawaii Press, 2024) examines how the Guomindang (GMD or Nationalists) sought to maintain control of middle-school students and cultivate their political loyalty over the trajectory of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese Civil War, and postwar Taiwan. During the Sino-Japanese War the Nationalists managed middle-school refugee students by merging schools, publishing and distributing updated textbooks, and assisting students as they migrated to the interior with their principals and teachers. In Taiwan, the China Youth Corps (CYC) became a symbol of the regime’s successful establishment. Tracing Nationalist efforts to indoctrinate ideology and martial spirit, Jennifer Liu investigates how GMD leaders Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo tried to build support among young people in their efforts to stabilize Taiwanese society under their rule. By comparing two key youth organizations—the Three People’s Principles Youth Corps in China, and the CYC on Taiwan—Liu uses education as a lens to analyze state-building in modern China. Liu’s careful analysis of the inner workings of GMD youth organizations also illuminates the day-to-day operations of military training in gender-segregated upper-middle schools—including how the government selected instructors and the skills taught to students. According to Liu, mandatory military training contributed to preventing major protest against the government but the policy was not without critics. Intellectuals, parents, and students voiced their dissent at what they perceived as excessive control by a repressive government and a waste of resources interfering with academics. The government-mandated civics curriculum, including government-approved textbooks and standards, reveals the characteristics and duties GMD officials believed modern citizens of the next generation should possess. Through provisions for refugee students, youth organizations, military training, and civics classes, GMD secondary education policy played a critical role in the process of state building in both modern China and Taiwan. Skillfully combining archival work in Nanjing and Taipei, along with oral interviews with former students and CYC administrators, instructors, and members, Liu offers a unique perspective toward a balanced assessment of Nationalist Party rule. Jennifer Liu is associate professor of East Asian history at Central Michigan University. She specializes in the political and social history of twentieth-century China, particularly education, youth culture, studen​t protest, and ethnic identity. Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Through a skillful combination of economic and cultural history, this book describes the impact on Moldavia and Wallachia of steam navigation on the Danube. The Danube route integrated the two principalities into a dense network of European roads and waterways. From the 1830s to the 1860s, steamboat transport transformed time and space for the areas that benefited from regular services. River traffic accelerated urban development along the Lower Danube and contributed directly to institutional modernization in one of Europe's peripheries. Beyond technological advances and the transportation of goods on a trans-imperial waterway, steamboat travel revolutionized human interactions, too. Steamboat Modernity: Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860 (CEU Press, 2024) offers a fascinating insight into the social and cultural milieu of the nineteenth century, drawing on first-hand accounts of Danube cruising.  Describing the story of travelers who interacted, met, and visited the places they stopped, Constantin Ardeleanu creates a transnational history of travel up and down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople. The pleasures and sometimes the travails of the travelers unfold against a backdrop of technical and economic transformation in the crucial period of modernization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

South Korea is sometimes held as a dream case of modernization theory, a testament to how economic development leads to democracy. Seeds of Mobilisation: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024) by Dr. Joan E. Cho takes a closer look at the history of South Korea to show that Korea’s advance to democracy was not linear. Instead, while Korea’s national economy grew dramatically under the regimes of Park Chung Hee (1961–79) and Chun Doo Hwan (1980–88), the political system first became increasingly authoritarian. Because modernization was founded on industrial complexes and tertiary education, these structures initially helped bolster the authoritarian regimes. In the long run, however, these structures later facilitated the anti-regime protests by various social movement groups—most importantly, workers and students—that ultimately brought democracy to the country. By using original subnational protest event datasets, government publications, oral interviews, and publications from labour and student movement organisations, Dr. Cho takes a long view of democratisation that incorporates the decades before and after South Korea’s democratic transition. She demonstrates that Korea’s democratisation resulted from a combination of factors from below and from above, and that authoritarian development itself was a hidden root cause of democratic development in South Korea. Seeds of Mobilization shows how socioeconomic development did not create a steady pressure toward democracy but acted as a “double-edged sword” that initially stabilised autocratic regimes before destabilising them over time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds (Routledge, 2024) investigates the peculiar absence of Islam and Muslims from Shakespeare’s canon. While many of Shakespeare’s plays were set in the Mediterranean, a geography occupied by Muslim empires and cultures, his work eschews direct engagement with the religion and its people. This erasure is striking given the popularity of this topic in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.  By exploring the limited ways in which Shakespeare uses Islamic and Muslim tropes and topoi, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Associate Professor of Literature at Harvey Mudd College, argues that Islam and Muslim cultures function as an alternate or shadow text in his works, ranging from his staged Mediterranean plays to his histories and comedies. By consigning the diverse cultures of the Islamic regimes that occupied and populated the early modern Mediterranean, Shakespeare constructs a Europe and Mediterranean freed from the presence of non-white, non-European, and non-Christian Others, which belied the reality of the world in which he lived. Focusing on the Muslims at the margins of Shakespeare’s works, Dadabhoy reveals that Islam and its cultures informed the plots, themes, and intellectual investments of Shakespeare’s plays.  In our conversation we discussed Shakespeare’s worldmaking and the social and political worlds of western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Ottoman empires, famous plays, such as The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and Othello, the figure of the “Moor,” and the threat of turning “Turk,” the intersection of race and geography in Shakespeare’s works, disrupting Anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia through critical reading, and Muslim adaptations of Shakespeare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

During the Republican period (1912–1949) and after, many Chinese Buddhists sought inspiration from non-Chinese Buddhist traditions, showing a particular interest in esoteric teachings. What made these Buddhists dissatisfied with Chinese Buddhism, and what did they think other Buddhist traditions could offer? Which elements did they choose to follow, and which ones did they disregard? And how do their experiences recast the wider story of twentieth-century pan-Asian Buddhist reform movements? Based on a wide range of previously unexplored Chinese sources, Esoteric Buddhism in China: Engaging Japanese and Tibetan Traditions, 1912–1949 (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how esoteric Buddhist traditions have shaped the Chinese religious landscape. Wei Wu examines cross-cultural religious transmission of ideas from Japanese and Tibetan traditions, considering the various esoteric currents within Chinese Buddhist communities and how Chinese individuals and groups engaged with newly translated ideas and practices. She argues that Chinese Buddhists’ assimilation of doctrinal, ritual, and institutional elements of Tibetan and Japanese esoteric Buddhism was not a simple replication but an active process of creating new meanings. Their visions of Buddhism in the modern world, as well as early twentieth-century discourses of nation building and religious reform, shaped the reception of esoteric traditions. By analyzing the Chinese interpretation and strategic adaptations of esoteric Buddhism, this book sheds new light on the intellectual development, ritual performances, and institutional formations of Chinese Buddhism in the twentieth century. To understand the broader forces that shaped the debates about esoteric Buddhism in modern China, please also check Wu Wei's article, "Buddhism and Superstition: Buddhist Apologetics in the Anti-Superstition Campaigns in Modern China," which is open access and can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Marc McMenamin's Ireland's Secret War: Dan Bryan, G2 and the Lost Tapes that Reveal The Hunt for Ireland's Nazi Spies (Gill Books, 2022) is a thrilling account of the true extent of Irish-Allied co-operation during World War II. It reveals strategic Nazi intentions for Ireland and the real role of leading government figures of the time, placing Dan Bryan and G2 - the military intelligence branch of the Irish Defence Forces - firmly at the centre of the country's battle against Nazi Germany. With the help of over thirty-five hours of previously unpublished audio recordings that were held in storage in northern California for over fifty years, McMenamin reveals the extraordinary unheard history of WWII in Ireland, told from the point of view of the main protagonists. Fascinating and entertaining, Ireland's Secret War reassesses the legacy of the Irish contribution to the Allied war effort through the voices of those involved at the time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1997, Saul Friedländer emphasized the need for an integrated history of the Holocaust. His suggestion to connect ‘the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society, and the world of the victims’ provides the inspiration for this volume. Following in these footsteps, this innovative study approaches Holocaust history through a combination of macro analysis with micro studies.  Featuring a range of contemporary research from emerging scholars in the field, New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust (de Gruyter, 2023) provides detailed engagement with a variety of historical sources, such as documents, artifacts, photos, or text passages. The contributors investigate particular aspects of sound, materiality, space and social perceptions to provide a deeper understanding of the Holocaust, which have often been overlooked or generalised in previous historical research. Yet, as we approach an era of no first hand witnesses, this multidisciplinary, micro-historical approach remains a fundamental aspect of Holocaust research, and can provide a theoretical framework for future studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba's radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative path to emancipation. Drawing on understudied archives, this pathbreaking work, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations (Cambridge UP, 2022) unearths a new history of Black rural geography and popular legalism, and offers a new framework for thinking about nineteenth-century Black freedom. Santiago de Cuba's Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, they negotiated their freedom and land piecemeal, through colonial legal frameworks that allowed for local custom and manumission. While gradually wearing down the institution of slavery through litigation and self-purchase, they reimagined colonial racial systems before Cuba's intellectuals had their say. Long before residents of Cuba protested for national independence and island-wide emancipation in 1868, it was Santiago's Afro-descendant peasants who, gradually and invisibly, laid the groundwork for emancipation. Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

During the Qing dynasty in China, a wide variety of people participated in a lottery game named weixing (“surname guessing”), which had participants placing bets on the surnames of civil service examination candidates. A fiercely competitive process, those who passed the various levels of the civil service and military examinations could climb the social ladder and obtain status in their communities and be considered for important positions in the government and military. The results of these examinations were not only highly anticipated by the exam takers themselves but also–with the introduction of weixing–by an enthusiastic community of players who bet on the success of candidates with less common surnames. In this episode, En Li, assistant professor of modern East Asian history at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of Betting on the Civil Service Exmaninations: The Lottery in Late Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2023), explores the fascinating history of this lottery game–from the longer history of games and betting in China and the origin of weixing to its regulation by the government to raise revenue and the spread of the game beyond China’s borders through Chinese diasporic communities to Southeast Asia and North America. The book considers the game from multiple perspectives–government officials, players, and lottery game runners. En Li thoughtfully reflects on the book and the process of producing it and points to the larger significance of both weixing and the civil service examinations in Chinese society and life and the risk, reward, and loss involved. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kunal M. Parker explores the massive reorientation of American legal, political, and economic thinking between 1870 and 1970. Over this period, American conceptions of law, democracy, and markets went from being oriented around truths, ends, and foundations to being oriented around methods, processes, and techniques. No longer viewed as founded in justice and morality, law became a way of doing things centered around legal procedure. Shedding its foundations in the 'people,' democracy became a technique of governance consisting of an endless process of interacting groups. Liberating themselves from the truths of labor, markets and market actors became intellectual and political techniques without necessary grounding in the reality of human behavior. Contrasting nineteenth and twentieth century legal, political, and economic thought, this book situates this transformation in the philosophical crisis of modernism and the rise of the administrative state. Kunal M. Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Throughout the nuclear age, states have taken many different paths toward or away from nuclear weapons. These paths have been difficult to predict and cannot be explained simply by a stable or changing security environment. We can make sense of these paths by examining leaders' nuclear decisions. The political decisions state leaders make to accelerate or reverse progress toward nuclear weapons define each state's course. Whether or not a state ultimately acquires nuclear weapons depends to a large extent on those nuclear decisions. Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a novel theory of nuclear decision-making that identifies two mechanisms that shape leaders' understandings of the costs and benefits of their nuclear pursuits. The internal mechanism is the intervention of domestic experts in key scientific and military organizations. If the conditions are right, those experts may be able to influence a leader's nuclear decision-making. The external mechanism emerges from the structure and politics of the international system. This book identifies three different proliferation eras, in which changes to international political and structural conditions have constrained or freed states pursuing nuclear weapons development. Scholars and practitioners alike will gain new insights from the fascinating case studies of nine states across the three eras. Through this global approach to studying nuclear proliferation, this book pushes back against the conventional wisdom that determined states pursue a straight path to the bomb. Instead, nuclear decisions define a state's nuclear pursuits. Our guest today is Lisa Langdon Koch, Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today I had the great pleasure of talking to Associate Professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee on her new book, Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985 (U California Press, 2024). Anxiety Aesthetics is the first book to consider a prehistory of contemporaneity in China through the emergent creative practices in the aftermath of the Mao era. Arguing that socialist residues underwrite contemporary Chinese art, complicating its theorization through Maoism, Jennifer Dorothy Lee traces a selection of historical events and controversies in late 1970s and early 1980s Beijing. Lee offers a fresh critical frame for doing symptomatic readings of protest ephemera and artistic interventions in the Beijing Spring social movement of 1978-80, while exploring the rhetoric of heated debates waged in institutional contexts prior to the '85 New Wave. Lee demonstrates how socialist aesthetic theories and structures continued to shape young artists' engagement with both space and selfhood and occupied the minds of figures looking to reform the nation. In magnifying this fleeting moment, Lee provides a new historical foundation for the unprecedented global exposure of contemporary Chinese art today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. In Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press, 2024) Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism. Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganisation was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians. Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach (Bloomsbury, 2022) uses a comparative framework to understand Russian history in a global context. The book challenges the idea of Russia as an outlier of European civilization by examining select themes in modern Russian history alongside cases drawn from the British Empire. Choi Chatterjee analyzes the concepts of nation and empire, selfhood and subjectivity, socialism and capitalism, and revolution and the world order in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In doing so she rethinks many historical narratives that bluntly posit a liberal West against a repressive, authoritarian Russia. Instead Chatterjee argues for a wider perspective which reveals that imperial practices relating to the appropriation of human and natural resources were shared across European empires, both East and West. Incorporating the stories of famous thinkers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Emma Goldman, Wangari Maathai, Arundhati Roy, among others. This unique interpretation of modern Russia is knitted together from the varied lives and experiences of those individuals who challenged the status quo and promoted a different way of thinking. This is a ground-breaking book with big and provocative ideas about the history of the modern world, and will be vital reading for students of both modern Russian and world history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Thousands of shows have opened on Broadway. Why do we remember some and not others? The musical theatre repertory is not composed of titles popular in the theatre but by those with successful cast recordings, movie versions, or even illegal bootlegs on YouTube. The shows audiences know, and the texts and music they expect to hear when they attend a production, are defined by media consumed at home more than by memories of performances witnessed in the theatre. For example, author Doug Reside shows that it is no accident that the serious book musical with a fixed score developed in the 1940s - when commercially pressed and marketed record albums made it possible to record most of the score of a new musical in a fixed medium. And Hamilton, a musical with dense lyrics and revolutionary musical style, would not have been as easily accessible to world audiences if most hadn't already had the opportunity to learn the score by listening to free digital streams of the original cast recording. The technologies that made these media possible developed concurrently with and shaped the American musical as an art form. Reside uncovers how the affordances and limitations of these technologies established a repertory of titles that are most frequently performed and defined by the texts used in these performances. Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory (Oxford UP, 2023) argues that the musicals we most remember are those which most effectively used their era's best recording and distribution technologies to document and share the work with those who would never see the original production on Broadway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Tessa Winkelmann examines interracial social and sexual contact between Americans and Filipinos in the early twentieth century via a wide range of relationships—from the casual and economic to the formal and long term. Dr. Winkelmann argues that such intercourse was foundational not only to the colonisation of the Philippines but also to the longer, uneven history between the two nations. Although some relationships between Filipinos and Americans served as demonstrations of US "benevolence," too-close sexual relations also threatened social hierarchies and the so-called civilizing mission. For the Filipino, Indigenous, Moro, Chinese, and other local populations, intercourse offered opportunities to negotiate and challenge empire, though these opportunities often came at a high cost for those most vulnerable. Drawing on a multilingual array of primary sources, Dangerous Intercourse highlights that sexual relationships enabled US authorities to police white and nonwhite bodies alike, define racial and national boundaries, and solidify colonial rule throughout the archipelago. The dangerous ideas about sexuality and Filipina women created and shaped by US imperialists of the early twentieth century remain at the core of contemporary American notions of the island nation and indeed, of Asian and Asian American women more generally. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Christopher Tounsel's book Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity (Cornell UP, 2024) explores the history of Black America's intellectual and cultural engagement with the modern state of Sudan. Ancient Sudan occupies a central place in the Black American imaginary as an exemplar of Black glory, pride, and civilization, while contemporary Sudan, often categorized as part of "Arab Africa," rather than "Black Africa," is often sidelined and overlooked. In this pathbreaking book, Christopher Tounsel unpacks the vacillating approaches of Black Americans to the Sudanese state and its multiethnic populace through periods defined by colonialism, postcolonial civil wars, genocide in Darfur, and South Sudanese independence. By exploring the work of African American intellectuals, diplomats, organizations, and media outlets, Tounsel shows how this transnational relationship reflects the robust yet capricious terms of racial consciousness in the African Diaspora. Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent. Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Dr. Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalisation of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Karen Sullivan of Bard College talks to Jana Byars about her recent book, Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen (U Chicago Press, 2023). A reparative reading of stories about medieval queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Much of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, we know from recorded rumor--gossip often qualified by the curious phrase "It was said" or the love songs, ballads, and romances that gossip inspired.  While we can mine these stories for evidence about the historical Eleanor, Karen Sullivan invites us to consider, instead, what even the most fantastical of these tales reveal about this queen and about life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. This book paints a fresh portrait of a singular medieval queen and the women who shared her world. The conversation gets into the idea of how we know what we know, and what we can possibly know about a woman this famous.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England: History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity (Brill, 2023) argues that in order to understand nationalisms, we need a clearer understanding of the types of cultural myths, symbols, and traditions that legitimate them. Myths of origin and election, memories of a greater and purer past, and narratives of persecution and mission are required for the production and maintenance of powerful national sentiments. Through an investigation of how early modern Catholics and Protestants reimagined, reinterpreted, and rewrote the lives of the founder-saints who spread Christianity in England, this book offers a theoretical framework for the study of origin narratives. Analyzing the discursive construction of time and place, the invocation of forces beyond the human to naturalize and authorize, and the role of visual and ritual culture in fabrications of the past, this book provides a case study for how to approach claims about founding figures. Serving as a timely example of the dependence of national identity on key religious resources, Griffin shows how origin narratives – particularly the founding figures that anchor them – function as uniquely powerful rhetorical tools for the cultural production of regional and national identity. Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines (Duke UP, 2023), Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje. He demonstrates that Filipino mestizo writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used mestizaje as a racial ideology of ability that marked Indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as lacking in civilization and in need of uplift and rehabilitation. Heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire. In this way, mestizaje allowed for supposedly superior mixed-race subjects to govern the archipelago in collusion with American imperialism. By bringing disability studies together with studies of colonialism and queer-of-color critique, Coráñez Bolton extends theorizations of mestizaje beyond the United States and Latin America while considering how Filipinx and Filipinx American thought fundamentally enhances understandings of the colonial body and the racial histories of disability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany After 1970 (Cornell UP, 2024) tells the story of how, in the aftermath of gay liberation, race played a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of queer, German politics. Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, Christopher Ewing charts both the entrenchment of racisms within white, queer scenes and the formation of new, antiracist movements that contested overlapping marginalizations. Far from being discrete political trajectories, racist and antiracist politics were closely connected, as activists worked across groups to develop their visions for queer politics. Ewing describes not only how AIDS workers, gay tourists, white lesbians, queer immigrants, and Black feminists were connected in unexpected ways but also how they developed contradictory concerns that comprised the full landscape of queer politics. Out of these connections, which often exceeded the bounds of the Federal Republic, arose new forms of queer fascism as well as their multiple, antiracist contestations. Both unsettled the appeals to national belonging, or "homonationalism," on which many white queer activists based their claims. Thus, the story of the making of homonationalism is also the story of its unmaking. The Color of Desire explains how the importance of racism to queer politics cannot—and should not—be understood without also attending to antiracism. Actors worked across different groups, making it difficult to chart separable political trajectories. At the same time, antiracist activists also used the fractures and openings in groups that were heavily invested in the logics of whiteness to formulate new, antiracist organizations and, albeit in constrained ways, shifted queer politics more generally. Christopher Ewing is Assistant Professor at Purdue University. His research focuses on the intersections of queer history and the history of race in modern Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2023) explores how an incredible group of Black women writers, including Alice Walker, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and writers and intellectuals convened an informal group called “The Sisterhood” and how they transformed American writing and cultural and educational institutions in the decades that followed. Thorsson traces the personal, professional, and political connections that led to the group’s emergence and explores the remarkable legacy. While focusing on the organizing, networking, and community building that nurtured Black women’s writing, The Sisterhood provides an impactful model of Black feminist collaboration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Master Lovers: A Twisted Puzzle of Love and Fascism (Outpost 19, 2023) author David Winner examines the complications of learning about the completex lives of family after they've passed. While clearing out his great aunt's midtown apartment after her death, Winner discovered artifacts of her storied existence: notes from opera stars, love letters and artifacts from the Middle East of the 1930's. His Aunt Dorle had been a co-founder of Angel Records and a prominent figure in the mid-century classical music world. But the more he learned about her world, the more complicated her story became, a twisted puzzle full of love and fascism, a record of a young woman grappling with her attraction to lovers with hair-raising political ties. A powerful work of family discovery, rooted in a bygone Midtown Manhattan and involving artists and politicians from around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A Woman's Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores a new dimension of Russian imperialism: women actively engaged in the process of late imperial expansion. The book investigates how women writers, travellers, and scientists who journeyed to and beyond Central Asia participated in Russia's "civilizing" and colonizing mission, utilizing newly found educational opportunities while navigating powerful discourses of femininity as well as male-dominated science. Katya Hokanson shows how these Russian women resisted domestic roles in a variety of ways. The women writers include a governor general's wife, a fiction writer who lived in Turkestan, and a famous Theosophist, among others. They make clear the perspectives of the ruling class and outline the special role of women as describers and recorders of information about local women, and as builders of "civilized" colonial Russian society with its attendant performances and social events. Although the bulk of their writings, drawings, and photography is primarily noteworthy for its cultural and historical value, A Woman's Empire demonstrates how they also add dimension and detail to the story of Russian imperial expansion and illuminates how women encountered, imagined, and depicted Russia's imperial Other during this period. Katya Hokanson is an associate professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The historical narratives of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible have much in common with Icelandic saga literature: both are invested in origins and genealogy, place-names, family history, sibling rivalry, conflict and its resolution. Yet the comparison between these two literatures is rarely made, and biblical translations in Old Norse-Icelandic have been neglected as a focus of literary study.  The Old Testament in Medieval Icelandic Texts: Translation, Exegesis and Storytelling (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Dr. Siân E. Grønlie aims to redress this neglect. It shows how the likeness between biblical narrative and saga narrative has shaped the reception of the Old Testament in medieval Iceland, even through multiple layers of translation and exegesis. It draws on a wide variety of texts, including homilies, saints' lives, world histories, encyclopaedic works, and the biblical translations collectively known as Stjórn, to explore how medieval Icelanders engaged with Old Testament narrative in the light of their own vernacular tradition of storytelling. And above all, it argues that the medieval Icelanders understood and recognised in these well-known biblical stories a narrative art that was strikingly akin to their own. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

This episode we have a single longform interview with a media scholar of note–The New School’s Shannon Mattern. We have teamed up with Mediapolis, a journal that places urban studies and media studies into conversation with one another, to interview Mattern about her new book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (U of Minnesota Press: 2018). And lucky for us on Phantom Power, a large portion of Mattern’s story is about sound, from the echoes of ancient caves to Roman amphitheaters to telephone wires and radio towers—she shows us how sonic infrastructures allow us to communicate and form communities, cultivating forms of intelligence that are embodied and affective, as well as informatic. Before there was the smart city, there was the sonic city—and the sonic city isn’t going anywhere soon. Some topics discussed: Patrick Feaster and First Sounds; Neil Postman; Harold Innis; Marshall McLuhan; John Durham Peters’ The Marvelous Clouds; Carolyn Birdsall’s Nazi Soundscapes.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey (Brill, 2023) offers a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialization through the lens of a mid-nineteenth-century cotton factory in the “Turkish Manchester,” the name chosen by the Ottomans for the industrial complex they built in the 1840s in Istanbul, which, in the contemporary words of one of the country’s most prominent contemporary Marxist theorists, became “the secret to and the basis of Turkish capitalism" in the 1930s. This book is available open access here.  Görkem Akgöz is is a post-doc researcher at Humboldt University and a lecturer at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Cecily N. Zander’s The Army under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era (LSU Press, 2024) is a pathbreaking study focusing on the fierce political debates over the size and use of military forces in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. It examines how prominent political figures, especially in the new Republican Party, interacted with the professional army and how those same leaders misunderstood the value of regular soldiers fighting to reunify the fractured nation and to extend it westward across the continent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The 21st century has witnessed a revolution in how historians approach the study of Roman Catholicism. Long trapped in an unbridgeable chasm between confessional scholars taking revealed truth as a point of departure & secular scholars ignoring the intellectual and experiential richness of religion, Catholicism has increasingly benefited from vibrant dialogues that are working to break down this divide, as scholars look beyond their local and national sites of research to think globally about this world-spanning religion.  University of Notre Dame scholar Jaime Pensado is at the forefront of the work of recasting Catholicism as a truly global object of inquiry, as evidenced by his most recent work Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico (University of California Press, 2023). In my conversation with Pensado, we explored some of the greatest intellectual boons of the global turn for the study of what he has called “the Catholic Sixties,” as well as persistent blind spots and crucial considerations for future research. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Founded in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation provides support to what their current website says are "exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions." In Circle of Winners: How the Guggenheim Foundation composition Awards Shaped American Music Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2023), Denise Von Glahn studies the institution between its founding and the late 1930s, with special emphasis on the music composition award. Funded by the Guggenheim mining fortune, the Foundation took early shape from the efforts of Carroll Wilson, Frank Aydelotte, and Henry Allen Moe--three Rhodes Scholars who initially struggled to envision and implement the organization's ambitious goals. One of the few groups providing support to composers before WWII, Von Glahn explains how the Foundation’s selection practices and the network that helped to shape and sustain its work impacted American classical music and picked winners in the American musical marketplace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg to discuss their new book with CEU Press entitled, The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism (CEU Press, 2023). The book is available Open Access, click here to download. The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance. The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure. Per and Achim’s book is part of our new series, CEU Press Perspectives. The series offers the latest viewpoints on both new and perennial issues, these books address a wide range of topics of critical importance today. The new series, originating from an international collection of leading authors, encourages us to look at issues from a different viewpoint, to think outside the box, and to stimulate debate. You can learn more about the series here. The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books. Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more here.  Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

When will I die? What is the sex of my unborn child? Which of two rivals will win a duel? As today, people in the later Middle Ages approached their uncertainties about the future, from the serious to the mundane, in a variety of ways. One of the most commonly surviving prognostic methods in medieval manuscripts is onomancy: the branch of divination that predicts the future from calculations based on the numbers that correlate to the letters of personal names. However, despite its ubiquity, it has been relatively little studied. Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain: Questioning Life, Predicting Death (York Medieval Press, 2024) by Dr. Joanne Edge analyses the intellectual and physical contexts of onomantic texts in some 65 manuscripts of British provenance between around 1150 and 1500, focusing on its two main varieties It demonstrates that onomancies were copied, owned and used by a people from a wide range of literate society in late medieval England: medical practitioners; the gentry and aristocracy; university scholars; and monks. And it seeks to answer the question of why a divinatory device, condemned in canon law as "Pythagorean necromancy", enjoyed such popularity in mainstream books of religion, medicine, and scholasticism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today I talked to Hippokratis Kiaris about his book The End of the Western Civilization?: The Intellectual Journey of Humanity to Adulthood (Vernon Press, 2022). The podcast episode delves into the intellectual and philosophical exploration of the Western civilization's journey from its inception to its current "adulthood" stage, guided by the insightful narrative and analysis of Professor Hippokratis Kiaris. Framing the development of Western civilization in stages akin to human development, Kiaris articulates how each phase of societal advancement mirrors the cognitive and moral growth phases from childhood towards adulthood, as seen through the lenses of intellectual history. He stretches this analogy from the explorative and question-driven "toddler" years characteristic of the Greek civilization era, through the rigid yet foundational "childhood" of the Middle Ages, moving onto the rebellious "teenage" years of the Enlightenment period, and finally arriving at the responsible yet crisis-ridden "adulthood" of contemporary times. Professor Kiaris's exploration doesn't solely reminisce on the past milestones but rather seeks to understand the inherent responsibilities, limitations, and existential dilemmas facing the West today, particularly those related to sustainability, technological reliance, and the urgent reevaluation of values towards more qualitative, rather than quantitative, societal growth. Through discussing the shifting paradigms towards expertise and technocracy, and the concurrent depersonalization and dehumanization of society, Kiaris offers a critical perspective on the Western civilization’s current challenges and questions the path forward, advocating for a balance between technological progress and maintaining a critical, human-centric approach to societal development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1867, John Muir set out on foot to explore the botanical wonders of the South, keeping a detailed journal of his adventures as he traipsed from Kentucky southward to Florida. One hundred and fifty years later, on a similar whim, veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman, distressed by sprawl-driven environmental ills in a region he loves, recreated Muir’s journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir’s time. Channeling Muir, he uses humor, keen observation, and a deep love of place to celebrate the South’s natural riches. But he laments that a treasured way of life for generations of Southerners is endangered as long-simmering struggles intensify over misused and dwindling resources. Chapman seeks to discover how Southerners might balance surging population growth with protecting the natural beauty Muir found so special. Each chapter touches upon a local ecological problem—at-risk species in Mammoth Cave, coal ash in Kingston, Tennessee, climate change in the Nantahala National Forest, water wars in Georgia, aquifer depletion in Florida—that resonates across the South. Chapman delves into the region’s natural history, moving between John Muir’s vivid descriptions of a lush botanical paradise and the myriad environmental problems facing the South today. Along the way he talks to locals with deep ties to the land—scientists, hunters, politicians, and even a Muir impersonator—who describe the changes they’ve witnessed and what it will take to accommodate a fast-growing population without destroying the natural beauty and a cherished connection to nature. A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land (Island Press, 2022) is part travelogue, part environmental cri de coeur, and paints a picture of a South under siege. It is a passionate appeal, a call to action to save one of the loveliest and most biodiverse regions of the world by understanding what we have to lose if we do nothing. Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches courses in U.S. and public history. His research interests focus on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. Connect with him at Matthew Simmons | LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Dr. Kendra Y. Hamilton’s Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess (University of Georgia Press, 2024) is a literary and cultural history of the Gullah Geechee Coast, a four-state area that is one of only a handful of places that can truly be said to be the “cradle of Black culture” in the United States. An African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within the coastal plain and the Sea Islands, the Gullah people have preserved a significant influence of Africanisms because of their unique geographic isolation.  This book seeks to fill a significant cultural gap in Gullah history. While there is a veritable industry of books on literary Charleston and on the Lowcountry, along with a plenitude of Gullah-inspired studies in history, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, and religion, there has never been a comprehensive study of the region’s literary influence, particularly in the years of the Harlem and Charleston Renaissance. By giving voice to artists and culture makers, uncovering buried histories, and revealing secret cross-racial connections amid official practices of Jim Crow, Hamilton sheds new light on an incomplete cultural history. Dr. Kendra Y. Hamilton is an associate professor of English and Director of Southern Studies at Presbyterian College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities?  Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focused on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this book shifts the focus away from elite circles to quotidian audiences. Its ten contributions range in scope, from music and visual media to theatre and popular fiction. Paying special attention to networks of movement and exchange across Arab societies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2023) heeds the call for 'translocal/transnational' cultural histories, while contributing to timely global studies on gender, sexuality, and morality. Focusing on the often-marginalized frequenters of cafés, artist studios, cinemas, nightclubs, and the streets, it expands the remit of who participated in the nahda and how they did. Raphael Cormack is an assistant professor of Arabic at the Durham University. He was previously a visiting researcher at Columbia University in the City of New York and holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. His most recent publication was Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring 20s (2021). He has also edited two collections of Arabic short stories translated into English, The Book of Khartoum and The Book of Cairo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery and, after a four-year struggle to become an independent slaveholding republic, died as emancipation dawned. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South. An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South (Oxford UP, 2024) shows, slave trading helped Southerners survive and fight the Civil War, as well as to build the future for which they fought. They mitigated the crises the war spawned by buying and selling enslaved people, using this commerce to navigate food shortages, unsettled gender roles, the demands of military service, and other hardships on the homefront. Some Rebels speculated wildly in human property, investing in slaves to ward off inflation and to buy shares in the slaveholding nation they hoped to create. Others traded people to counter the advance of emancipation. Given its centrality to their nationhood, Confederates went to great lengths to prolong the slave trade, which, in turn, supported the Confederacy. For those held in slavery, the surviving slave trade dramatically shaped their pursuit of freedom, inserting a retrograde movement into some people's journeys toward liberty while inspiring others to make the risky decision to escape. Offering an original perspective on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, the Civil War, and emancipation, Robert K.D. Colby illuminates the place of the peculiar institution within the Confederate mind, the ways in which it underpinned the CSA's war effort, and its impact on those attempting to seize their freedom. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The British Army won a convincing series of victories between 1916 and 1918. But by 1939 the British Army was an entirely different animal. The hard-won knowledge, experience and strategic vision that delivered victory after victory in the closing stages of the First World War had been lost. In the inter-war years there was plenty of talking, but very little focus on who Britain might have to fight, and how.  Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman's book Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40 (Bloomsbury, 2023) clearly illustrates how the British Army wasn't prepared to fight a first-class European Army in 1939 for the simple reason that as a country Britain hadn't prepared itself to do so. The failure of the army's leadership led directly to its abysmal performance in Norway and France in 1940. Victory to Defeat is a captivating history of the mismanagement of a war-winning army. It is also a stark warning that we neglect to understand who our enemy might be, and how to defeat him, at the peril of our country. The British Army is now to be cut to its smallest size since 1714. Are we, this book asks, repeating the same mistakes again? General The Lord Dannatt GCB CBE MC DL is one of the UK's most respected military commentators. He was chief of the Defense Staff and Commander-in-chief, 2006-2009. Robert Lyman is one of Britain's top military historians. He spent 20 years in the British Army and he is currently a Research Fellow at the Changing Face of War Centre, Pembroke College, University of Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Newspaper (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Maggie Messitt is about more than news printed on paper. It brings us inside our best and worst selves, from censorship and the intentional destruction of historic record, to partisan and white supremacist campaigns, to the story of an instrument that has been central to democracy and to holding the powerful to account. This is a 400-year history of a nearly-endangered object as seen by journalist Maggie Messitt in the two democratic nations she calls home – the United States and South Africa. The “first draft of history,” newspapers figure prominently through each movement and period of unrest in both nations-from the first colonial papers published by slave traders and an advocate for press freedom to those published on ID cards, wallpaper, and folio sheets during civil wars. Offices were set on fire. Presses were pushed into bodies of water. Editors were run out of town. And journalists were arrested. Newspaper reflects on a tool that has been used to push down and to rise up, and a journey alongside the hidden lives that have harnessed its power. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Even as most contemporary states look to history in order to legitimize their existence in some way or other, the past – and narrations of it – hold particular weight in China. This is not a new phenomenon, for which pasts to elevate and which to suppress has long been a concern for both intellectuals and those seeking to rule the states and empires which have occupied the space now forming the People’s Republic of China. Today’s Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping is no exception to this, and indeed is making unusually strenuous efforts to circumscribe an acceptable vision of the past. Yet, as Ian Johnson’s beautifully put together and captivatingly written new book Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (Oxford UP, 2023) shows, no small number of scholars, film-makers, artists, writers and researchers continue to work to ensure that less convenient histories endure into the future. Based on years of research and experience, this is a powerful – and ultimately cautiously hopeful – book about the possibility for ordinary people to keep hold of often-painful but vitally important pasts. Working to make this more likely, Ian Johnson also heads the China Unofficial Archives project. Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and socialism and empire in Eurasia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Gendered Publics: Chandraprava Saikiani and the Mahila Samiti in Colonial Assam (Oxford UP, 2024) is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive appraisal of the relatively unexplored but highly impactful women’s associations, the Assam Mahila Samiti (1926 cont.) which led one of the most remarkable women’s movements in colonial India; Sucheta Kripalani praised it as the ‘largest democratic women’s association in India’ in 1949. Central to the Assam Mahila Samiti story is its founding Secretary, the firebrand feminist Chandraprava Saikiani (1901–72), who while being an unwed mother and belonging to a lower caste, was a celebrated writer, mobilizer, and publisher. The book traverses these individual and collective journeys from the 1920s to the 1950s and explores how women’s movements evolve in conversation/contestation with both traditional spaces such as naam kirtan and contemporary ones of tribal-caste associations, anti-colonial movements, and international ideological paradigms such as the Bolshevik revolution.  The book also plots through specific examples, such as the controversy surrounding the Samiti’s serving of a legal notice to a groom in 1934 to stop child marriage, to argue that gender may not function merely as constitutive of the public, but women’s collectives may shape, transform, and orchestrate a veritable gendered public, resistant to both native patriarchy and sometimes to colonial authority. The study makes crucial methodological intervention through an interdisciplinary approach by constantly juxtaposing print sources with handwritten minutes of early mahila samiti meetings, performative spaces such as women’s singing of naam kirtan and women’s weaving, and women’s memory (recorded as part of a digital archive of the mahila samitis in Assam). Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The foremost authority on modern war in the English-speaking world examines Europe's most important conflict since World War II. More than any other modern war, the fight between Russia and Ukraine has been a tough testing ground for modern weapons and operational concepts. In Modern Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine (Penguin, 2023), Sir Lawrence Freedman assesses the contrasting strategies of the two sides. Ukraine has fought along classical lines, seeking victory through battle. Russia has adopted a more total approach, combining conventional battles with attacks on Ukraine's socio-economic structure. Freedman explains why the apparently superior Russian force has been unable to defeat and subjugate Ukraine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States. Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties. Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in archives in both Israel and the United States, The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship (Cambridge UP, 2022) discusses the development of relations built through constant contact between people and ideas, showing how presidents and Prime Ministers, state officials, and ordinary people from both countries, impacted one another. It was this constancy of religion, values, and history, serving the bedrock of the relations between the two countries and peoples, over which the ephemeral was negotiated. The author, David Tal, is Professor and Yossi Harel Chair in Modern Israel Studies in the Department of History at the University of Sussex. A historian of diplomatic and military history, he has published extensively on Israeli diplomatic and military history, and U.S. diplomatic history and disarmament policies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Marion Casey is a professor at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University where she also serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. She has published widely on various aspects of Irish-American history and in 2006 she co-edited Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States with Joe Lee. In this interview, she discusses Her most recent book The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image (NYU Press, 2024), which surveys the changing images of Ireland and Irishness in American popular culture. The Green Space examines the variety of factors that contributed to remaking the Irish image from downtrodden and despised to universally acclaimed. To understand the forces that molded how people understand “Irish” is to see the matrix—the green space—that facilitated their interaction between the 1890s and 1960s. Marion R. Casey argues that, as “Irish” evolved between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a visual and rhetorical expanse for representing ethnicity was opened up in the process. The evolution was also transnational; both Ireland and the United States were inextricably linked to how various iterations of “Irish” were deployed over time—whether as a straightforward noun about a specific people with a national identity or a loose, endlessly malleable adjective only tangentially connected to actual ethnic identity. Featuring a rich assortment of sources and images, The Green Space takes the history of the Irish image in America as a prime example of the ways in which culture and identity can be manufactured, repackaged, and ultimately revolutionized. Understanding the multifaceted influences that shaped perceptions of “Irishness” holds profound relevance for examining similar dynamics within studies of various immigrant and ethnic communities in the US. The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image is published with NYU Press, as part of their Irish Diaspora series Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Lucy Barnhouse of Arkansas State University talks with Jana Byars about her new book, Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland: Houses of God, Places for the Sick, out 2023 with Amsterdam University Press. From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the development of European hospitals was shaped by their claim to the legal status of religious institutions, with its attendant privileges and responsibilities. The questions of whom hospitals should serve and why they should do so have recurred -- and been invested with moral weight -- in successive centuries, though similarities between medieval and modern debates on the subject have often been overlooked. Hospitals' legal status as religious institutions could be tendentious and therefore had to be vigorously defended in order to protect hospitals' resources. This status could also, however, be invoked to impose limits on who could serve in and be served by hospitals. As recent scholarship demonstrates, disputes over whom hospitals should serve, and how, find parallels in other periods of history and current debates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Dr. Sean Griffin's book, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus (Cambridge UP, 2019), takes on the question of the source materials for the Primary Chronicle, one of the most important texts for the study of medieval Russia. Griffin argues that key portions of the Chronicle have their origin in Byzantine liturgy. This thesis has broad implications for what is and can be known about the early Rus.' Griffin further argues that Rus' state power had a direct interest in liturgy, and he is carrying this interest forward into a forthcoming book on technologies of power in present-day Russia. Listeners interested in this latter topic should be interested in the present interview; the manner in which the Russian state has sacralized its power illustrates fascinating continuities, from the early Rus' to the present day.  Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Redwood Press, 2024) is a riveting and unapologetic account of Palestinian resistance, the story of one family's care for their land, and a reflection on love and heartache while living under military occupation. In 1967, Sireen Sawalha's mother, with her young children, walked back to Palestine against the traffic of exile. My Brother, My Land is the story of Sireen's family in the decades that followed and their lives in the Palestinian village of Kufr Ra'i. From Sireen's early life growing up in the shadow of the '67 War and her family's work as farmers caring for their land, to the involvement of her brother Iyad in armed resistance in the First and Second Intifada, Sami Hermez, with Sireen Sawalha, crafts a rich story of intertwining voices, mixing genres of oral history, memoir, and creative nonfiction. Through the lives of the Sawalha family, and the story of Iyad's involvement with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hermez confronts readers with the politics and complexities of armed resistance and the ethical tensions and contradictions that arise, as well as with the dispossession and suffocation of people living under occupation and their ordinary lives in such times. Whether this story leaves readers discomforted, angry, or empowered, they will certainly emerge with a deeper understanding of the Palestinian predicament. Sami Hermez is an anthropologist and teaches at Northwestern University in Qatar. He is the author of War Is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (2017). His work in and out of the classroom reflects a strong commitment to freedom, justice, and equality. His family's history of migration spans the Levant, with roots in Al-Qosh, Aleppo, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Sami lives in Doha with his family. SIREEN SAWALHA, born in the small village of Kufr Rai in Jenin, Palestine, comes from a family deeply connected to the region's rich history. She moved to the US in 1990 and completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Rider University. Recognized by Cornell University for her outstanding contributions to education in 2022, Sireen serves as a social studies teacher in New Jersey. Beyond academia, she is a passionate chef and compelling storyteller, sharing her family's experiences under occupation. Sireen raises awareness about Palestinian culture and actively contributes to the struggle for Palestinian freedom. My Brother, My Land is the story of her family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV (Indiana UP, 2022) examines an under-researched segment of the larger Nazi incarceration system: camps and other detention facilities under the direct control of the German military, the Wehrmacht. These include prisoner of war (POW) camps (including camps for enlisted men, camps for officers, camps for naval personnel and airmen, and transit camps), civilian internment and labor camps, work camps for Tunisian Jews, brothels in which women were forced to have sex with soldiers, and prisons and penal camps for Wehrmacht personnel. Most of these sites have not been described in detail in the existing historical literature, and a substantial number of them have never been documented at all. The volume also includes an introduction to the German prisoner of war camp system and its evolution, introductions to each of the various types of camps operated by the Wehrmacht, and entries devoted to each individual camp, representing the most comprehensive documentation to date of the Wehrmacht camp system. Within the entries, the volume draws upon German military documents, eyewitness and survivor testimony, and postwar investigations to describe the experiences of prisoners of war and civilian prisoners held captive by the Wehrmacht. Of particular note is the detailed documentation of the Wehrmacht's crimes against Soviet prisoners of war, which have largely been neglected in the English-language literature up to this point, despite the fact that more than three million Soviet prisoners died in German captivity. The volume also provides substantial coverage of the diverse range of conditions encountered by other Allied prisoners of war, illustrating both the substantial privations faced by all prisoners of war and the stark contrast between the Germans' treatment of Soviet prisoners and those of other nationalities. The volume also details the significant involvement of the Wehrmacht in crimes against the civilian populations of occupied Europe and North Africa. As a result, this volume not only brings to light many detention sites whose existence has been little known, but also advances the decades-old process of dismantling the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht," according to which the German military had nothing to do with the Holocaust and the Nazi regime's other crimes. Dallas Michelbacher and Alexandra Lohse are applied research scholars at USHMM.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Rustam Alexander's Gay Lives and 'Aversion Therapy' in Brezhnev's Russia, 1964-1982 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) examines the autobiographies and diaries of Soviet homosexual men who underwent psychotherapy during the period from 1970 to 1980 under the guidance of Yan Goland, a psychiatrist-sexopathologist from Gorky. The examination of these unique and little-known documents contributes to our scant knowledge about the practices that many would call a Soviet proto-type of 'aversion therapy'. It also helps us understand the way homosexual people faced "queer dilemmas" of the self and how they sought to reconcile their queer desire with being Soviet. Tatiana Klepikova is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia (Temple UP, 2022) provides an in-depth historical analysis of Philadelphia politics from the days of the Great Migration to the present. Philadelphia has long been a crucial site for the development of Black politics across the nation and this volume emphasizes how Black activists have long protested against police abuse, pushed for education reform, challenged job and housing discrimination, and put presidents in the White House. If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress demonstrates that “Philadelphia must be central to any analysis of African American political history.” But politics means more than elected office and the book highlights political strategies such as the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" movement and the Double V campaign. It demonstrates how Black activism helped shift Philadelphia from the Republican machine to Democratic leaders in the 1950s and highlights the election of politicians like Robert N. C. Nix, Sr., the first African American representative from Philadelphia. The book highlights grassroots movements and the intersection of race, gender, class, and politics in the 1960s and shows how African Americans from the 1970s to the present challenged (white) Mayor Frank Rizzo and helped elect (Black) Mayors Wilson Goode, John Street, and Michael Nutter. Dean James Wolfinger (he/him/his) serves as dean of the School of Education at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. Dr. Stanley Arnold (he/him/his) is an Associate Professor of American History at Northern Illinois University. Dr. Alyssa Ribeiro (she/her/hers) is the Henry A Logan, Sr, Professor of American History at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.  Ms. Daniela Lavergne at Saint Joseph’s University served as the editorial assistant for this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Weimar Republic is well-known for its gay rights movement and recent scholarship has demonstrated some of its contradictory elements. In his recent book entitled The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Javier Samper Vendrell writes the first study to focus on the League for Human Rights and its leader, Friedrich Radszuweit. It uses his position at the center of the Weimar-era gay rights movement to tease out the diverging political strategies and contradictory tactics that distinguished the movement. By examining news articles and opinion pieces, as well as literary texts and photographs in the League’s numerous pulp magazines for homosexuals, Vendrell reconstructs forgotten aspects of the history of same-sex desire and subjectivity. While recognizing the possibilities of liberal rights for sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic, the League’s "respectability politics" failed in part because Radszuweit’s own publications contributed to the idea that homosexual men were considered a threat to youth, doing little to change the views of the many people who believed in homosexual seduction – a homophobic trope that endured well into the twentieth century. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1935, two Soviet satirists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, undertook a 10,000-mile American road trip from New York to Hollywood and back. They immortalised their journey in a popular travelogue entitled One-storied America (published as Little Golden America in the US), a suite of newspaper articles, and a series of photographs.  In Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip (Cambridge UP, 2024), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum reconstructs this epic journey, exploring Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with a vast range of characters, from famous authors, artists, poets and filmmakers to unemployed hitchhikers and revolutionaries. Using the authors’ notes, archival material in both Russia and the US, and even FBI files, she reveals the role played by ordinary individuals in shaping foreign relations as Ilf, Petrov and the immigrants, communists, and fellow travellers who served as their hosts, guides, and translators became creative actors in cultural exchange between the two countries. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is Professor of History at West Chester University. In addition to her latest book Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip (2024), she is the author of Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (Routledge Falmer, 2000); The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge University Press 2015). Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

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 that America endures endless wars because its leaders no longer know how to think about war in strategic terms and he reveals how ideas on limited war and war in general have evolved against the backdrop of American conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. These ideas, he shows, were and are flawed and have undermined America's ability to understand, wage, and win its wars, and to secure peace afterwards. America's leaders he argues have too often taken the nation to war without understanding what they want or valuing victory, leading to the “forever wars” of today in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present(Cambridge University Press, 2019) dismantles seventy years of misguided thinking and lays the foundations for a new approach to the wars of tomorrow. Why American Loses War is a must read for policy practitioners, serving soldiers and the lay educated public. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War (Oxford University Press, 2019), Julia G. Young reframes the Cristero War as a transnational conflict, using previously unexamined archival materials from both Mexico and the United States to investigate the intersections between Mexico's Cristero War and Mexican migration to the United States during the late 1920s. She traces the formation, actions, and ideologies of the Cristero diaspora--a network of Mexicans across the United States who supported the Catholic uprising from beyond the border. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and what its usage in early modern Europe reveals about contemporary views of both commerce and Judaism. Trivellato begins by explaining the development of bills of exchange in the Middle Ages as a means of transferring funds across long distances, ones which helped the expansion of international trade. Though used by both Christians and Jews, concerns about crypto-Judaism among converted Christians in the town of Bordeaux where Cleirac lived may have been key to his belief in their association with the bills. From Cheirac’s book the myth then spread throughout much of western and central Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, where it was used both to support anti-Semitic views and as examples by philo-Semitic writers such as Montesquieu of the superior commercial ability of Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism (U Chicago Press, 2019), Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism. Jaffe shows that Japan’s growing economic ties to the subcontinent following World War I fostered even more Japanese pilgrimage and study at Buddhism’s foundational sites. Tracking the Japanese travelers who returned home, as well as South Asians who visited Japan, Jaffe describes how the resulting flows of knowledge, personal connections, linguistic expertise, and material artifacts of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism instantiated the growing popular consciousness of Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition—in the heart of Japan. Dr. Richard M Jaffe is a Religious Studies Professor at Duke University focusing on Japanese Buddhism. He is also the director of the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke. Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Prit Buttar's book Centuries Will Not Suffice: A History of the Lithuanian Holocaust (Amberley, 2023) explores how different people responded to the Lithuanian Holocaust and the roles that they played. It considers the past history of the perpetrators and those who took great risks to save Jews, as well as describing the experiences of many who were caught up in the maelstrom. Unlike the figures at the top of the Nazi hierarchy, the men who were responsible for these killings have been largely forgotten. Karl Jäger was a senior SS figure who was in charge of the units that carried out most of them. He complained that his experiences caused him to suffer nightmares but continued to order his units to carry on and refused offers of sick leave on the grounds that he regarded it as his duty to remain in his post. He took refuge in compiling painstakingly detailed reports of the killings, listing the numbers executed at every location and breaking them down into men, women and children. T he roles played by other figures, from Himmler and Heydrich at the summit, through the ranks of men down to Martin Weiss and Bruno Kittel who were personally responsible for carrying out Nazi policies, are all described. Before the German invasion of Lithuania, two diplomats - Chiune Sugihara from Japan and Jan Zwartendijk from the Netherlands - recognised the great danger that lay ahead for the Jews of the Baltic region and did what they could to help them escape. Karl Plagge, a major in the army, did all he could to save Jews. What perhaps make the terrible story of the Baltic genocide unique is that the Nazi regime was able to rely upon collaboration by convincing the populace that the Soviet invasion of the area was the responsibility of the Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Decisions to go to war are often framed in cost-benefit terms, and typically such assessments do not factor in longer term costs. However, recent dramatic improvements in American military medicine have had an unanticipated effect: saving more soldiers' lives has vastly increased long-term, downstream costs of war with profound consequences for global politics in an era of heightened great power competition. In Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War (Oxford UP, 2024), Tanisha Fazal traces the modern history of medical treatment and casualty rates in American conflicts from the Civil War to the more recent counterinsurgency wars. As she shows, wars became increasingly survivable for wounded troops, to the point now where a large majority of wounded soldiers survive.  Yet the human and financial implications of this steep increase in the wounded-to-killed ratio are dramatic, and her powerful analysis of this shift provides a necessary corrective to how we understand the costs of war. For each major conflict, Fazal analyzes the weapons used, injuries sustained, and policies put in place for veterans' care and pensions. As she argues, these improvements have significant financial and deeply personal implications for the returned wounded and their families, as well as the US government and its citizenry. Fazal's analysis highlights the significance of policymakers underestimating the costs of war, which in turn makes it easier both to initiate and continue military action abroad, contributing to Americas' penchant for engaging in so-called "endless wars." Tanisha Fazal is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship focuses on sovereignty, international law, and armed conflict. In addition to her new book, she is the author of two award-winning books and numerous articles in academic and policy journals. From 2021-2023, she was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Herman J. (1897–1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture’s only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture. In The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics (University of Mississippi Press, 2019), Sydney Stern draws on interviews, letters, diaries, and other documents still in private hands to provide a uniquely intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the lives, loves, work, and relationship between these complex men. The book is part of the Hollywood Legends Series of the University of Mississippi Press. Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra, and Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have—a career in New York theater. Herman, formerly an Algonquin Round Table habitué, New York Times and New Yorker theater critic, and playwright-collaborator with George S. Kaufman, never reconciled himself to screenwriting. He gambled away his prodigious earnings, was fired from all the major studios, and drank himself to death at fifty-five. While Herman drifted downward, Joe rose to become a critical and financial success as a writer, producer, and director, though his constant philandering with prominent stars like Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Gene Tierney distressed his emotionally fragile wife who eventually committed suicide. He wrecked his own health using uppers and downers in order to direct Cleopatra by day and finish writing it at night, only to be very publicly fired by Darryl F. Zanuck, an experience from which Joe never fully recovered. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The astonishing behind-the-scenes story of the 1963 film Cleopatra and how it changed the face of Hollywood makes it one of the most fabled films of all time.  Starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the film’s making soon became a cautionary tale, for the lavish extravagance of production on Cleopatra all but bankrupted 20th Century Fox and almost singlehandedly set in motion the decline of the major Hollywood movie studios. By the time the film was finally released, 20th Century Fox and the world watched as it died at the box office. Cleopatra and the Undoing of Hollywood: How One Film Almost Sunk the Studios (History Press, 2023) is an epic tale of love and lust, gossip, money, sex, movie-star madness, studio politics, and the birth of paparazzi journalism. Within the saga of Cleopatra lies the end of the era of Hollywood's studio system, the seeds of the Swinging Sixties, and the stuff of timeless movie legend. Patrick Humphries has been a writer and journalist for over forty years and has published numerous books on musical artists such as the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Pink Floyd, and Bruce Springsteen. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing delve into various aspects of popular culture. She is particularly interested in exploring the public history of women's fiction and the portrayal of femme characters in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. John Powers examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture. By reasserting the physicality of the body in making time-lapse and kinesthetic sequences with the Bolex, filmmakers conversed with other art forms and integrated broader spheres of humanistic and scientific inquiry into their artistic process. Drawing from the photographic qualities of stocks such as Tri-X and Kodachrome, they discovered pliant metaphors that allowed them to connect their artistic practice to metaphysics, spiritualism, and Hollywood excess. By framing film labs as mystical or adversarial, they cultivated an oppositionality that valorized control over the artistic process. And by using the optical printer as a tool for excavating latent meaning out of found footage, they posited the reworking of images as fundamental to the exploration of personal and cultural identity. Providing a wealth of new detail about the making of canonised avant-garde classics by such luminaries as Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage, as well as rediscovering works from overlooked artists such as Chick Strand, Amy Halpern, and Gunvor Nelson, Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture uses technology as a lens for examining the process of making: where ideas come from, how they are put into practice, and how arguments about those ideas foster cultural and artistic commitments and communities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Civil War and the Great War occupy very different places in American memory and, often, in U.S. history books. Yet, they were fought only fifty years apart and have more connections than are often recognized and remembered. During the Great War, as World War I was initially known, people from leaders to ordinary Americans still remembered the Civil War. They drew lessons, contrasts, and were generally influenced by the previous conflict.  In a new edited collection, Wars Civil and Great: The American Experience in the Civil War and World War I (University of Kansas Press, 2023), editors David J. Silbey and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai bring these two wars into conversation to bring about a deeper understanding of the history of both. Each contributing author addresses four overarching questions: What legacy did the Civil War leave? Did the World War I generation interpret the lessons of the Civil War, and if so, how? How did the Great War change the lessons from the Civil War era? And finally, how did both wars contribute to the modernization of the United States? The unique periodization of this volume provides insights often unknown or overlooked. In this episode of the podcast, we speak with the co-editors about the concept of the collection and some of those insights. We discuss the military and political leadership of the wars as well as medical, environmental, and mental health histories and, finally, veterans' experiences and historical memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Sandinista Revolution and its victory against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua gripped the United States and the world in the 1980s. But as soon as the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990 and the Iran Contra affair ceased to make headlines, it became, in Washington at least, a thing of the past.  In The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History (UNC Press, 2024), Mateo Jarquin recenters the revolution as a major episode in the history of Latin America, the international left, and the Cold War. Drawing on research in Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica, he recreates the perspective of Sandinista leaders in Managua and argues that their revolutionary project must be understood in international context. Because struggles over the Revolution unfolded transnationally, the Nicaraguan drama had lasting consequences for Latin American politics at a critical juncture. It also reverberated in Western Europe, among socialists worldwide, and beyond, illuminating global dynamics like the spread of democracy and the demise of a bipolar world dominated by two superpowers. Jarquin offers a sweeping analysis of the last left-wing revolution of the twentieth century, an overview of inter-American affairs in the 1980s, and an incisive look at the making of the post-Cold War order. Mateo Jarquín is assistant professor of history at Chapman University. Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century—including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath—finally gets her due in this colorful biography of legendary editor Judith Jones. When Judith Jones began working at Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, the twenty-five-year-old spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile until one caught her eye. She read the book in one sitting, then begged her boss to consider publishing it. A year later, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl became a bestseller. It was the start of a culture defining career in publishing.  Over more than half a century as an editor at Knopf, Jones became a legend, nurturing future literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. At the forefront of the cookbook revolution, she published the who’s who of food writing: Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child. Jones celebrated culinary diversity, forever changing the way Americans think about food. Her work spanned the decades of America’s most dramatic cultural change. From the end of World War II through the Cold War; from the civil rights movement to the fight for women’s equality, Jones’s work questioned convention, using books as a tool of quiet resistance. Now, her astonishing and career is explored for the first time. Based on exclusive interviews, never-before-seen personal papers, and years of research, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America (Atria, 2024) tells the riveting behind-the scenes-narrative of how stories are made, finally bringing to light the audacious life of one of our most influential tastemakers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

If you are familiar with traditional Chinese literature, you have likely come across the figure of the “shrew,” a morally threatening woman who is either transgressive and polluting, promiscuous, or violent (or perhaps a combination of all three). Scholars of literature typically write about how this archetype faded out after 1911, while the figure of the more ‘modern’ “new woman” came to dominate. In Untamed Shrews: Negotiating New Womanhood in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2023), Shu Yang shows how the shrew persisted and actually served as the basis for the celebrated “new woman,” thus revealing an entirely different relationship between the shrew and the new woman and a new origin story for symbols of female empowerment in modern China.  In Untamed Shrews, Yang charts how the figure of the shrew was used to depict early Chinese suffragettes, pulled into discussions of female jealousy, reworked in reconsiderations of female promiscuity and henpecked husbands, and repackaged in Communist reconfigurations of how reasonable revolutionary wives ought to behave. Throughout, Yang provides careful and detailed readings of a wide range of sources, scrutinizing the historical context and wider meaning of the shrew as she appeared in newspaper accounts, fiction, and theater.  Untamed Shrews is sure to be of interest to anyone who works on modern Chinese literature, Republican history, global 'new women,' and print culture, as well as those fascinated by literary repackagings and depictions of the shrew -- both in tamed and untamed forms.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 2022, the U.S. Mint released the first batch of its American Women Quarters series, celebrating the achievements of U.S. women throughout its history. The first set of five included Maya Angelou, Sally Ride…and Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American to ever appear on U.S. currency. Katie Gee Salisbury takes on Anna May Wong’s life in her book Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong (Dutton, 2024). The biography takes readers through Wong’s life, from her start in Hollywood’s early days, her struggles against prejudiced studio executives unwilling to give her the spotlight, through to her groundbreaking trip to China. In this interview, Katie and I talk about Anna May Wong’s life, her struggles against censorship, and what films you should watch to understand Wong as an actress. A fifth-generation Chinese American from Southern California, Katie has spoken and written about Anna May Wong on MSNBC, in the New York Times and in Vanity Fair. She also writes the newsletter Half-Caste Woman. She was a 2021 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship finalist and gave the TED Talk “As American as Chop Suey.” Follow on Instagram at @annamaywongbook and on Twitter at @ksalisbury. Other links: —Katie on writing Anna May Wong’s biography, for Lithub —An excerpt of Not Your China Doll, for PBS You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Including its review of Not Your China Doll. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Mirabai, an iconic sixteenth-century Indian poet-saint, is renowned for her unwavering love of God, her disregard for social hierarchies and gendered notions of honor and shame, and her challenge to familial, feudal, and religious authorities. Defying attempts to constrain and even kill her, she could not be silenced. Though verifiable facts regarding her life are few, her fame spread across social, linguistic, and religious boundaries, and stories about her multiplied across the subcontinent and the centuries. In Mirabai: The Making of a Saint (Oxford UP, 2023), Nancy M. Martin traces the story of this immensely popular Indian saint from the earliest manuscript references to her through colonial and nationalist developments to scholarly and popular portrayals in the decades leading up to Indian independence. This book examines Mirabai's place as both insider and outsider to the developing strands of devotional Hinduism and her role in contested terrain of debates around the education and independence of women and the crafting of Indian and Hindu identities. Mirabai offers a comprehensive and multi-layered portrait of this remarkable and still controversial woman, who continues to be a source of inspiration and catalyst for self-actualization for spiritual seekers, artists, activists, and so many others in India and around the world today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Antarctica is, and has always been, very much “for sale.” Whales, seals, and ice have all been marketed as valuable commodities, but so have the stories of explorers. The modern media industry developed in parallel with land-based Antarctic exploration, and early expedition leaders needed publicity to generate support for their endeavours. Their lectures, narratives, photographs, and films were essentially advertisements for their adventures. At the same time, popular media began to use the newly encountered continent to draw attention to commercial products. These advertisements both trace the commercialization of Antarctica and reveal how commercial settings have shaped the dominant imaginaries of the place. By contextualising and analysing Antarctic advertisements from the late nineteenth century to the present, Brand Antarctica: How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) by Dr. Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen identifies five key framings of the South Polar continent: a place for heroes, a place of extremity, a place of purity, a place to protect, and a place that transforms. Demonstrating how these conceptual framings of Antarctica in turn circulate through our culture, Dr. Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen challenges common assumptions about Antarctica’s past and present, encouraging readers to rethink their own relationship with the Far South. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the early nineteenth century, the American commercial marketplace was a chaotic, unregulated environment in which knock-offs and outright frauds thrived. Appearances could be deceiving, and entrepreneurs often relied on their personal reputations to close deals and make sales. Rapid industrialization and expanding trade routes opened new markets with enormous potential, but how could distant merchants convince potential customers, whom they had never met, that they could be trusted?  Through wide-ranging visual and textual evidence, including a robust selection of early advertisements, Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) by Dr. Jennifer M. Black tells the story of how advertising evolved to meet these challenges, tracing the themes of character and class as they intertwined with and influenced graphic design, trademark law, and ideas about ethical business practice in the United States. As early as the 1830s, printers, advertising agents, and manufacturers collaborated to devise new ways to advertise goods. They used eye-catching designs and fonts to grab viewers’ attention and wove together meaningful images and prose to gain the public’s trust. At the same time, manufacturers took legal steps to safeguard their intellectual property, formulating new ways to protect their brands by taking legal action against counterfeits and frauds. By the end of the nineteenth century, these advertising and legal strategies came together to form the primary components of modern branding: demonstrating character, protecting goodwill, entertaining viewers to build rapport, and deploying the latest graphic innovations in print. Trademarks became the symbols that embodied these ideas—in print, in the law, and to the public. Branding Trust thus identifies and explains the visual rhetoric of trust and legitimacy that has come to reign over American capitalism. Though the 1920s has often been held up as the birth of modern advertising, Dr. Black argues that advertising professionals had in fact learned how to navigate public relations over the previous century by adapting the language, imagery, and ideas of the American middle class. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Xiongnu: The World’s First Nomadic Empire (Oxford UP, 2024), Bryan K. Miller weaves together archaeology and history to chart the course of the Xiongnu empire, which controlled the Eastern Eurasian steppe from ca. 200 BCE to 100 CE. Through a close analysis of both material artifacts and textual sources, Miller centers the nomadic perspective, showcasing the flexibility, resilience, and mobility of this steppe regime.  Comprehensive and wide-reaching, Xiongnu explores the rise of the empire, details how the empire controlled nodes of wealth and far-flung power bases, and charts the slow and fractured decline of the Xiongnu empire. Throughout, Miller provides fascinating readings of burial goods, vibrant tellings of oath ceremonies, and careful interpretations of Chinese letters and histories. Xiongnu firmly brings its nomad protagonists onto center stage and into sharp focus, and this book is bound to appeal to those interested in archaeology, nomadic societies, and world history.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls. The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, Massachusetts. Poetry and science started to grow apart, and modern thinkers challenged the old orthodoxies, offering thrilling new perspectives that suddenly felt radical--and too dangerous for women. Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science (Princeton UP, 2024) intertwines the stories of these two luminary nineteenth-century minds whose thought and writings captured the awesome possibilities of the new sciences and at the same time strove to preserve the magic of nature. Just as Darwin's work was informed by his roots in natural philosophy and his belief in the interconnectedness of all life, Dickinson's poetry was shaped by her education in botany, astronomy, and chemistry, and by her fascination with the enchanting possibilities of Darwinian science. Casting their two very different careers in an entirely fresh light, Renée Bergland brings to life a time when ideas about science were rapidly evolving, reshaped by poets, scientists, philosophers, and theologians alike. She paints a colorful portrait of a remarkable century that transformed how we see the natural world. Illuminating and insightful, Natural Magic explores how Dickinson and Darwin refused to accept the separation of art and science. Today, more than ever, we need to reclaim their shared sense of ecological wonder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

To begin the celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, this episode features a conversation with Dr. Catherine Ceniza Choy about her book Asian American Histories of the United States (Beacon Press, 2022). Choy’s study identifies pivotal years in Asian American history as the focus of her eight chapters, which includes the beginning of Asian exclusionary policy with the Page Law in 1875, the rapid changes of 1965 and 1969, which saw a growing Asian America in understanding and demographics, to 2020 and the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. In just 175 pages, Choy weaves together the layered histories of exclusion, violence, and resistance to rectify the generalizations that come from a “misunderstanding of Asian Americans and their histories” (Preface, ix).  Catherine Ceniza Choy is an award-winning Asian American historian and professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America and Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History, which won the 2003 American Journal of Nursing History and Public Policy Book Award and the 2005 Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award. An engaged public scholar, Choy has been interviewed in many media outlets, including ABC’s 20/20, The Atlantic, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, and Vox, about the history of anti-Asian hate and violence as well as the connections between racism and misogyny. Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Histories of North Korea typically focus on one man — Kim Il Sung — and one narrative — his grand rise to absolute power. Andre Schmid’s new book, North Korea's Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953-1965 (University of California Press, 2024), tells a much more complex and richly textured story. Moving away from the focus on Kim Il Sung, Schmid looks at how the Korean population participated in party-state projects to create “New Living”: a quest for a better life, realized through socialism. Each part of North Korea’s Mundane Revolution focuses on a question that was central to a different aspect of New Living: How to self-improve? How to build more efficiently? How to make a happy family home? How to consume properly? In exploring these questions, Schmid looks at a wide range of overlooked sources, especially North Korean magazines and journals, complete with tongue-in-cheek cartoons and photographs. Wonderfully nuanced, empirically rich, and utterly compelling, this book not only sheds light on the origins of North Korea's durability, but it does so through a fascinating history of unhappy housewives and prefabricated apartments.  North Korea’s Mundane Revolution is sure to appeal to those interested in Korean history and global histories of gender, socialist revolution, and print culture, as well as anyone who has ever wondered "How do you do North Korean history?" And if you want to read more about this book before diving in, you should check out how it fares at the ‘The Page 99 Test,’ here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What is a classic in historical writing? How do we explain the continued interest in certain historical texts, even when their accounts and interpretations of particular periods have been displaced or revised by newer generations of historians? How do these texts help to maintain the historiographical canon? Dr. Jaume Aurell's innovative study What Is a Classic in History?: The Making of a Historical Canon (Cambridge University Press, 2024) ranges from the heroic writings of ancient Greek historians such as Herodotus to the twentieth century microhistories of Carlo Ginzburg. The book explores how certain texts have been able to stand the test of time, gain their status as historiographical classics, and capture the imaginations of readers across generations. Investigating the processes of permanence and change in both historiography and history, Dr. Aurell further examines the creation of historical genres and canons. Taking influence from methodologies including sociology, literary criticism, theology, and postcolonial studies, What Is a Classic in History? encourages readers to re-evaluate their ideas of history and historiography alike. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Shakespeare's Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Victoria Sparey examines the varied representation of adolescent characters in Shakespeare's plays. Using early modern medical knowledge and an understanding of contemporary theatrical practices, the book unpacks complexities that surrounded the cultural and theatrical representations of 'signs' associated with an individual's physical maturation. Each chapter explores the implications of different 'signs' of puberty, in verbal cues, facial adornments, vocal traits and body sizes, to illuminate how Shakespeare presents vibrant adolescent selves and stories. By analysing female and male puberty together in its discussion of adolescence, Shakespeare's adolescents provides fresh insight into the age-based symmetry of early modern adolescent identities. The book uses the adolescent's state of transformation to illuminate how the unfixed nature of adolescence was valued in early modern culture and through Shakespeare's celebrated characters and actors. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Was Weimar doomed from the outset? In November 1918: The German Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2020), Robert Gerwarth argues that this is the wrong question to ask. Forget 1929 and 1933, the collapse of Imperial Germany began as a velvet revolution where optimism was as common as pessimism. A masterful synthesis told through diaries and memories, Gerwarth reminds us that contemporaries live events before we have them act out history. Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at UCD and Director of the Centre for War Studies. He is the author of The Bismarck Myth (Oxford UP, 2005) and a biography of Reinhard Heydrich (Yale UP, 2011). His third monograph, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End was published by Penguin (UK) and FSG (US) in the autumn of 2016. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Guilds were prominent in medieval and early modern Europe, but their economic role has seldom been studied. In The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2019), Sheilagh Ogilvie offers a wide-ranging examination of what guilds did and how they affected pre-modern economies. As Ogilvie explains, guilds were particularized institutions which created and enforced privileges for their members while denying them to outsiders. This authority was granted to them by rulers and governments, and depended on their intricate relationship with the public authorities. Their privileges entitled guilds to determine who could participate in a profession, the quality of the items their members produced, and the technological innovations their members could adopt. Ogilvie looks at all aspects of guild activities to show their wide-ranging impact on the economies of their time, and the ways they pursued their members’ interests even when it stifled growth for the rest of society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generations. As George R. Boyer details in The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain (Princeton University Press, 2019), it only emerged after decades of different legislative responses to the problems of poverty that reflected shifting societal attitudes on the subject. As Boyer explains, welfare policy in the early 19th century primarily consisted of cash or in-kind payments provided for people living in their homes. This changed with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which replaced it with the infamous workhouse system. Though this brought down expenditures on the poor, the expectation that poverty was being reduced was belied by a series of reports at the end of the century which exposed the extent of urban poverty to a shocked nation. In response, the Liberal governments of the early 20th century passed a series of laws that established unemployment insurance and pensions for the elderly. While these expanded considerably the role of the state in providing for the poor, Boyer demonstrates that they fell well short of a comprehensive system, one which William Beveridge detailed in a famous 1942 report that served as the blueprint for the legislation passed by the Labour government after the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Is alcohol a universal feature of human society? Why is problematic in some countries and not others? How was alcohol helped build the modern state? These are just a few of the questions that sociologist John O'Brien addresses in States of Intoxication: The Place of Alcohol in Civilisation(Routledge, 2018). His book offers a broad and diverse perspective on alcohol use and suggests that booze has been an important element in developing communities and building up tax bases. In the era of "superpubs" and microbreweries, O'Brien lends insight into contemporary discussions around alcohol. Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (Northwestern University Press, 2019) by Christopher Cameron, an Associate Professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, is a precise and nuanced history of African American secularism from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. This text is written with economy and clarity as defined by four concise chapters that detail the major moments in African American history including some discussion of Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights-Black Power era. Traversing nearly two centuries of black thought, from the Antebellum period to the demise of the Black Power era, Black Freethinkers is the first comprehensive historical survey of black free thought. For Cameron, free thought encompasses atheism, agnosticism, deism, paganism and other non-traditional modes of thinking. Cameron’s work focuses primarily on the ideas advanced by African American men and women of letters such as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin to support his core argument that freethought and “unbelief” have been key elements of Black thought since the era of enslavement to the institutionalization of free thought oriented associations in African American society. Cameron’s work forces us to rethink the way we study the era of enslavement and African American culture, and the place of Douglass as an American intellectual central to this history, as well as the role of religion in Black life more generally. In many respects, his text presents a more humanistic portrait of African American thought and culture from a historical perspective that goes well beyond most texts on this subject. Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., has taught survey courses in U.S. history, Western Civilization, and upper division courses on the history of African Americans at the university level for more than fifteen years. Her teaching and research interests include: African American intellectual history, gender in U.S. history, and race/ethnicity studies. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and encyclopedia entries and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). You can learn more about her work here or follow her on twitter (@DrHettie2017).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Historians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming—the “Southern enclosure movement”—to be a watershed event in the region’s history. In the decades after World War II, this transition pushed innumerable sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and smallholders off the land, redistributing territory and resources upward to a handful of large, mainly white operators. By disproportionately displacing Black farmers, enclosure also slowed the progress of the civil rights movement and limited its impact. Dr. John Cable’s Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (University Press of Kansas, 2023) is among the first studies to explore that process through the interpretive lens of settler colonialism. Focusing on east-central Mississippi, home of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Dr. Cable situates enclosure in the long history of dispossession that began with Indian Removal. The book follows elite white landowners and Black and Choctaw farmers from World War II to 1960—the period when the old, labor-intensive farm structure collapsed. By acknowledging that this process occurred on taken land, Dr. Cable demonstrates that the records of agricultural agents, segregationist politicians, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are traces of ongoing colonization. The settler colonial framework, rarely associated with the postwar South, sheds important light on the shifting categories of race and class. It also prompts comparisons with other settler societies (states in southern and eastern Africa, for instance) whose timelines, racial regimes, and agrarian transitions were similar to those of the South. This postwar history of the South suggests ways in which the BIA’s termination policy dovetailed with Southern segregationism and, at the same time, points to some of the shortcomings of the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

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 thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while trying to destroy what came before, and voraciously sought out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas to the Congo ruled by Belgium s brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Azoulay travels alongside historical companions - an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums - to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as 'past' and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics. Ariella Aisha Azoulay is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University Yorgos Giannakopoulos is an Academy of Athens postdoctoral research fellow at King’s Collage London Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Disruption: The Global Economic Shocks of the 1970s and the End of the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Michael De Groot argues that the global economic upheaval of the 1970s was decisive in ending the Cold War. Both the West and the Soviet bloc struggled with the slowdown of economic growth; chaos in the international monetary system; inflation; shocks in the commodities markets; and the emergence of offshore financial markets. The superpowers had previously disseminated resources to their allies to enhance their own national security, but the disappearance of postwar conditions during the 1970s forced Washington and Moscow to choose between promoting their own economic interests and supporting their partners in Europe and Asia. Dr. de Groot shows that new unexpected macroeconomic imbalances in global capitalism sustained the West during the following decade. Rather than a creditor nation and net exporter, as it had been during the postwar period, the United States became a net importer of capital and goods during the 1980s that helped fund public spending, stimulated economic activity, and lubricated the private sector. The United States could now live beyond its means and continue waging the Cold War, and its allies benefited from access to the booming US market and the strengthened US military umbrella. As Disruption demonstrates, a new symbiotic economic architecture powered the West, but the Eastern European regimes increasingly became a burden to the Soviet Union. They were drowning in debt, and the Kremlin no longer had the resources to rescue them. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of the new book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford UP, 2024). An expert in constitutional law, Pozen argues that the drug war has been an unmitigated disaster, in terms of money, efficacy, and human rights. But even as activists peel off the drug war’s more unsavory aspects through cannabis and psychedelic legalization, Pozen also argues that they’ve neglected to consider the impact America’s courts could have on rectifying oppressive drug laws. It wasn’t always this way. The Constitution of the War on Drugs also details the “hidden history” of a brief legal moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s when lawyers effectively argued for liberalized drug policies – on the sound basis of the Constitution. The moment was eventually overturned, but Pozen argues it could be a useful historical lesson for people interested in the effects of constitutional law on the drug war today. A link to the digital edition of The Constitution of the War on Drugs will soon be available here. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is coming out soon from the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This very structured form, created using garments called bodies and farthingales, existed in various extremes in Western Europe and beyond, in the form of stays, corsets, hoop petticoats and crinolines, right up until the twentieth century.  With a nuanced approach that incorporates a stunning array of visual and written sources and drawing on transdisciplinary methodologies, Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Dr. Sarah Bendall explores the relationship between material culture and femininity by examining the lives of a wide range of women, from queens to courtiers, farmer's wives and servants, uncovering their lost voices and experiences. It reorients discussions about female foundation garments in English and wider European history, arguing that these objects of material culture began to shape and define changing notions of the feminine bodily ideal, social status, sexuality and modesty in the early modern period, influencing enduring Western notions of femininity. Beautifully illustrated in full colour throughout, Shaping Femininity is the first large-scale exploration of the materiality, production, consumption and meanings of women's foundation garments in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. It offers a fascinating insight into dress and fashion in the early modern period, and offers much of value to all those interested in the history of early modern women and gender, material culture and consumption, and the history of the body, as well as curators and reconstructors. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Imagining Musical Pasts: the Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson University Press, 2023) by Kristin M. Franseen explores the complicated archive of sources, interpretations, and people present in queer writings on opera and symphonic music from ca. 1880 to 1935. It focuses primarily on the work of three turn-of-the-twentieth-century music scholars--philosopher and horror writer Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget), biographer and program note annotator Rosa Newmarch, and critic and amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson. All three were queer, all discussed music both as part of fiction and nonfiction writing, and all worked outside of the academy. Rather than finding a grand unifying theory of early queer musicology, Franseen has closely examined three idiosyncratic writers who struggled to stay true to their ideas of intellectual honesty while also writing about music, musical figures, and musical listening in quite different ways. By studying each scholar's individual approach to constructing and interpreting musical and sexual knowledge, the book draws attention to aspects of their work previously neglected or considered only in isolation. Franseen meditates on questions of what constitutes historical evidence, what role should gossip and rumor have in nonfiction writing, and what should count as musicology, as she discusses each person's work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Dr. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024), Dr. Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Dr. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (“the place where we get bows”), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish. A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America’s doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Dr. Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of “killer languages” like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Podcasting in a Platform Age: From an Amateur to a Professional Medium (Bloomsbury, 2024) explores the transition underway in podcasting by considering how the influx of legacy and new media interest in the medium is injecting professional and corporate logics into what had been largely an amateur media form. Many of the most high-profile podcasts today, however, are produced by highly-skilled media professionals, some of whom are employees of media corporations. Legacy radio and new media platform giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify are also making big (and expensive) moves in the medium by acquiring content producers and hosting platforms. This book focuses on three major aspects of this transformation: formalization, professionalization, and monetization. Through a close read of online and press discourse, analysis of podcasts themselves, participant observations at podcast trade shows and conventions, and interviews with industry professionals and individual podcasters, John Sullivan outlines how the efforts of industry players to transform podcasting into a profitable medium are beginning to challenge the very definition of podcasting itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Pacific Ocean is twice the size of the Atlantic, and while humans have been traversing its current-driven maritime highways for thousands of years, its sheer scale proved an obstacle to early European imperial powers. Enter Lope Martin, a forgotten Afro-Portuguese ship pilot heretofore unheralded by historians.  In Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery (Mariner Books, 2021), UC-Davis history professor and Bancroft Prize winner Andrés Reséndez tells the story of Martin and the broader history of trans-Pacific travel in the 16th century. Part environmental history, part imperial expeditionary tale, and part swashbuckling adventure, Reséndez recounts thousands of years of Pacific history, tracking the long story of connection between the western coast of the Americas and the eastern coast of Asia. In doing so, he reveals just how dynamic and metropolitan early imperial Spanish maritime culture was, and broadens our horizons beyond the usual stories of well known explorers such as Columbus and Magellan. By unearthing the long-ignored story of Martin, Conquering the Pacific reveals a rich history of excitement, danger, and of human resilience under remarkable circumstances. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What does it mean to be human? What do we know about the true history of humankind? In this episode, I spoke with historian and NYU professor Stefanos Geroulanos to discuss his new book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) to discover how claims about the earliest humans and humankind’s true beginnings inform political and social practices to this day. How do the various stories we tell about human origins, including those about neanderthals, homo sapiens, killer apes, noble savages, and missing links shape the modern world? Have you followed a keto diet, become aware of your reptile brain, idealized a pre-modern state of existence or demonized others as behaving like Neanderthals? Geroulanos explains how accounts of prehistory arise in particular historical moments to solve contemporary problems, often linked to but as often quite apart from actual scientific knowledge. The Invention of Prehistory provides a crucial and timely examination of how the pursuit of understanding humanity's beginnings has been intertwined with agendas of war and domination. Further Listening on the Think About It podcast: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “The Social Contract” with Melissa Schwartzberg Michel Foucault on Truth and Knowledge with Ann Stoler Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents” with Peter Brooks The Alarmingly Relevant Hannah Arendt with Richard Bernstein Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Unexpected Routes: Refugee Writers in Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Tabea Alexa Linhard chronicles the refugee journeys of six writers whose lives were upended by fascism in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II: Cuban-born Spanish writer Silvia Mistral, German-born Spanish writer Max Aub, German writer Anna Seghers, German author Ruth Rewald, Swiss-born political activist, photographer, and ethnographer Gertrude Duby, and Czech writer and journalist Egon Erwin Kisch. While these six writers came from different backgrounds, wrote in different languages, and enjoyed very different levels of recognition in their lifetimes and posthumously, they all made sense of their forced displacement in works that reveal their conflicted relationships with the people and places they encountered in transit as well as in Mexico, the country in which they all eventually found asylum. The literary output of these six brilliant, prolific, but also flawed individuals reflects the most salient contradictions of what it meant to escape from fascist occupied Europe. In a study that bridges history, literary studies, and refugee studies, Dr. Linhard draws connections between colonialism, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II and the Holocaust to shed light on the histories and literatures of exile and migration, drawing connections to today's refugee crisis and asking larger questions around the notions of belonging, longing, and the lived experience of exile. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

During the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Chocó, was famed for its rich placer deposits. Gold mined here was central to New Granada’s economy yet this Pacific frontier in today’s Colombia was considered the “periphery of the periphery.” Infamous for its fierce, unconquered Indigenous inhabitants and its brutal tropical climate, it was rarely visited by Spanish administrators, engineers, or topographers and seldom appeared in detail on printed maps of the period. In The History of a Periphery: Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia's Pacific Lowlands (U Texas Press, 2024), Juliet Wiersema uncovers little-known manuscript cartography and makes visible an unexamined corner of the Spanish empire. In concert with thousands of archival documents from Colombia, Spain, and the United States, she reveals how a "periphery" was imagined and projected, largely for political or economic reasons. Along the way, she unearths untold narratives about ephemeral settlements, African adaptation and autonomy, Indigenous strategies of resistance, and tenuous colonialisms on the margins of a beleaguered viceroyalty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Kings of the Garden: The New York Knicks and Their City (Three Hills, 2024), Adam J. Criblez traces the fall and rise of the New York Knicks between the 1973, the year they won their last NBA championship, and 1985, when the organization drafted Patrick Ewing and gave their fans hope after a decade of frustrations. During these years, the teams led by Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Bob McAdoo, Spencer Haywood, and Bernard King never achieved tremendous on-court success, and their struggles mirrored those facing New York City over the same span. In the mid-seventies, as the Knicks lost more games than they won and played before smaller and smaller crowds, the city they represented was on the brink of bankruptcy, while urban disinvestment, growing income inequality, and street gangs created a feeling of urban despair. Kings of the Garden details how the Knicks' fortunes and those of New York City were inextricably linked. As the team's Black superstars enjoyed national fame, Black musicians, DJs, and B-boys in the South Bronx were creating a new culture expression―hip-hop―that like the NBA would become a global phenomenon. Criblez's fascinating account of the era shows that even though the team's efforts to build a dynasty ultimately failed, the Knicks, like the city they played in, scrappily and spectacularly symbolized all that was right―and wrong―with the NBA and the nation during this turbulent, creative, and momentous time. Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

We are used to thinking of ourselves as living in a time when more information is more available than ever before. In The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Nicholas Popper shows that earlier eras had to grapple with the same problem—how to deal with too much information at their fingertips. Popper reveals that early modern Britain was a society newly drowning in paper, a light and durable technology whose spread allowed statesmen to record drafts, memoranda, and other ephemera that might otherwise have been lost, and also made it possible for ordinary people to collect political texts. As original paperwork and copies alike flooded the government, information management became the core of politics. Focusing on two of the primary political archives of early modern England, the Tower of London Record Office and the State Paper Office, Popper traces the circulation of their materials through the government and the broader public sphere. In this early media-saturated society, we find the origins of many issues we face today: Who shapes the archive? Can we trust the pictures of the past and the present that it shows us? And, in a more politically urgent vein: Does a huge volume of widely available information (not all of it accurate) risk contributing to polarization and extremism? Listen to Nick Popper speak with New Books Network about Walter Ralegh's "History of the World" and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) on New Books Network here. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Alexander Statman's book A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science. The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to challenge the emerging concept of Western advancement. A Global Enlightenment traces this overlooked exchange between China and the West to make compelling claims about the history of progress, notions of European exceptionalism, and European engagement with Chinese science. To tell this story, Alexander Statman focuses on a group of thinkers he terms “orphans of the Enlightenment,” intellectuals who embraced many of their contemporaries’ ideals but valued ancient wisdom. They studied astronomical records, gas balloons, electrical machines, yin-yang cosmology, animal magnetism, and Daoist medicine. And their inquiries helped establish a new approach to the global history of science. Rich with new archival research and fascinating anecdotes, A Global Enlightenment deconstructs two common assumptions about the early to late modern period. Though historians have held that the idea of a mysterious and inscrutable East was inherent in Enlightenment progress theory, Statman argues that it was the orphans of the Enlightenment who put it there: by identifying China as a source of ancient wisdom, they turned it into a foil for scientific development. But while historical consensus supposes that non-Western ideas were banished from European thought over the course of the Enlightenment, Statman finds that Europeans became more interested in Chinese science—as a precursor, then as an antithesis, and finally as an alternative to modernity. Alexander Statman is a Distinguished Scholar and JD candidate at the UCLA School of Law and a former A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Boubacar N’Diaye's book Mauritania's Colonels: Political Leadership, Civil-Military Relations and Democratization (Routledge, 2017), the result of more than a decade of research, focuses on the socio-political dynamics and civil-military relations in a little studied country: Mauritania, located in the troubled North-western part of Africa. Boubacar N'Diaye brings into light the political evolution of this country which holds lessons for African politics, and could affect the future of the West African sub-region. Mauritania's Colonels examines the personalities and policy of five military officers turned heads of state who ruled Mauritania for nearly forty years. After comparing and contrasting the personal traits, social origins, itineraries, and evolution as military officers, it critically evaluates the policies they enacted to address four key challenges their country faces. These are, namely, the difficult cohabitation between the country's ethno-cultural communities, the illusive democratization and military withdrawal from politics, the judicious management of the country's abundant natural resources to meet the socioeconomic needs of their people, and the prudent conduct of foreign policy given Mauritania's location, straddling Arab North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. Showing the impact that each Colonel has had on the evolution of Mauritania, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of West Africa, African politics, civil-military relations and democratization processes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In April 1942, at least half a million people fled the city of Madras, now known as Chennai. The reason? The British, after weeks of growing unease about the possibility of a Japanese invasion, finally recommended that people leave the city. In the tense, uncertain atmosphere of 1942, many people took that advice to heart–and fled. The Japanese, of course, did not invade in 1942. But between the attack on Pearl Harbor and, say, mid-1942 when the Allies held back the Japanese advance, both the Indian colonial establishment and pro-independence activists thought carefully about the possibility of invasion—and how to respond to it, if it happened. Mukund Padmanabhan writes about this panic in his first bookThe Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked over a Japanese Non-invasion (Vintage Books, 2024). In this interview, Mukund and I talk about the fierce debates in India about how to respond to the threat of a Japanese invasion. Mukund Padmanabhan is the former Editor of The Hindu, one of India’s largest and most respected newspapers. He was appointed to the post in 2016, after having been Editor of the business daily, Hindu BusinessLine. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Krea University, near Chennai. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Flap of 1942. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Offering a dynamic and wide-ranging examination of the key issues at the heart of the study of German Fascism, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany 1930-1945 (Routledge, 2013) brings together a selection of Geoff Eley’s most important writings on Nazism and the Third Reich. Featuring a wealth of revised, updated and new material, Nazism as Fascism analyses the historiography of the Third Reich and its main interpretive approaches. Themes include: Detailed reflection on the tenets and character of Nazi ideology and institutional practices Examination of the complicated processes that made Germans willing to think of themselves as Nazis Discussion of Nazism’s presence in the everyday lives of the German People Consideration of the place of women under the Third Reich In addition, this book also looks at the larger questions of the historical legacy of Fascist ideology and charts its influence and development from its origin in 1930’s Germany through to its intellectual and spatial influence on a modern society in crisis. In Nazism as Fascism, Geoff Eley engages with Germany’s political past in order to evaluate the politics of the present day and to understand what happens when the basic principles of democracy and community are violated. This book is essential reading not only for students of German history, but for anyone with an interest in history and politics more generally Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Pamela Roberston Wojcik examines America's ambivalent and shifting attitude toward homelessness. She considers film cycles from five distinct historical moments that show characters who are unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed—characters who fail, resist, or opt out of the mandate for a home of one's own. From the tramp films of the silent era to the 2021 Oscar-winning Nomadland, Dr. Wojcik reveals a tension in the American imaginary between viewing homelessness as deviant and threatening or emblematic of freedom and independence. Blending social history with insights drawn from a complex array of films, both canonical and fringe, Dr. Wojcik effectively "unhomes" dominant narratives that cast aspirations for success and social mobility as the focus of American cinema, reminding us that genres of precarity have been central to American cinema (and the American story) all along. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this colorful book, historian Sudev Sheth traces how a family of diamond dealers deployed wealth to play off political leaders and survive the collapse of the Mughal Empire. The story highlights the unique role played by Jain and Hindu bankers in the daily affairs of Islamic, Hindu, and early colonial forms of Indian government. Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge UP, 2024) features brazen emperors, sickly princes, irate governors, and quick-witted matriarchs who commanded banking networks across cities. It explores unlikely rivalries, flaky friendships, and daring tycoons who gambled vast sums as a way to hedge against political uncertainty. Sheth employs unconventional sources to tap into the thrilling lives of moneyed persons. Excerpts from Persian diaries, Gujarati poems, French trading manuals, Marathi letters, Sanskrit hymns, and Dutch shipping records tell new tales and are presented in English translation for the very first time. Spanning several political dynasties and still thriving today as a billion-dollar family firm in its fourteenth generation, the entrepreneurs featured in this book help us see state power and social change through fresh eyes. How did capitalists outsmart politicians, and what insights can we gain for our own times? You can get 20% off the price of this book with code BRE2023 at Cambridge University Press. Brittany Puller is a PhD candidate in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation examines caste, kinship, and community in the making of Sikh misls in eighteenth-century Punjab. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

J.N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (Oxford University Press, 2024) describes the work of one of the most important and under-studied theologians in the history of Christianity. In the late 1820s, John Nelson Darby abandoned his career as a priest in the Church of Ireland to become one of the principal leaders of a small but rapidly growing religious movement that became known as the "Plymouth Brethren." Darby and other brethren modified the Calvinism that was common among their evangelical contemporaries, developing distinctive positions on key doctrines relating to salvation, the church, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the end times. After his death in 1882, Darby's successors revised and expanded his arguments, and Darby became known as the architect of the most influential system of end-times thinking among the world's half-a-billion evangelicals. This "dispensational premillennialism" exercises extraordinary influence in religious communities, but also in popular culture and geopolitics. But claims that Darby created this theological system may need to be qualified -for all his innovation, this reputation might be undeserved. This book reconstructs Darby's theological development and argues that his innovations were more complex and extensive than their reduction into dispensationalism might suggest. In fact, Darby's thought might be closer to that of his Reformed critics than to that of modern exponents of dispensationalism. Crawford Gribben is Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast. Caleb Zakarin is editor at New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is everywhere in the New York metropolitan area. Founded in 1921, its portfolio includes airports, marine terminals, bus stations, bridges, tunnels, and real estate. But its history is not widely known and its inner workings are little understood by people who traverse its domain when they fly into John F. Kennedy International Airport, ride the PATH trains from New York to New Jersey, or drive across the George Washington Bridge. Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York (U Michigan Press, 2023), by Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles, aims to fill this gap in public knowledge with a history of the Port Authority. Spanning 100 years, Mobilizing the Metropolis closely charts the evolution of the Port Authority as it went from improving rail freight around New York Harbor to building bridges and managing real estate. At the same time, the book explores the evolution of the authority’s internal culture in the face of actions by elected officials in New York and New Jersey that have reduced the agency’s autonomy and affected its operations. Mobilizing the Metropolis also extracts from the history of the Port Authority useful lessons about how organizations charged with solving governmental problems can win support and engage opposition. Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is completing an oral history of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City for Cornell University Press. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the earliest enemy of the Nazis, and the first spy to crack Hitler's deadliest secret code: the framework of the Final Solution. In public life, Dr. Winthrop Bell was a Harvard philosophy professor and wealthy businessman. As an MI6 spy--known as secret agent A12--in Berlin in 1919, he evaded gunfire and shook off pursuers to break open the emerging Nazi conspiracy. His reports, the first warning of the Nazi plot for World War II, went directly to the man known as C, the mysterious founder of MI6, as well as to various prime ministers. But a powerful fascist politician quietly worked to suppress his alerts. Nevertheless, Dr. Bell's intelligence sabotaged the Nazis in ways only now revealed in Jason Bell's Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Agent A12 and the Solving of the Holocaust Code (Pegasus Books, 2024). As World War II approached, Bell became a spy once again. In 1939, he was the first to crack Hitler's deadliest secret code: Germany's plan for the Holocaust. At that time, the führer was a popular politician who said he wanted peace. Could anyone believe Bell's shocking warning? Fighting an epic intelligence war from Eastern Europe and Russia to France, Canada, and finally Washington, DC, Agent A12 was a real-life 007, waging a single-handed struggle against fascists bent on destroying the Western world. Without Bell's astounding courage, the Nazis just might have won the war. Jason Bell, PhD, is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick. He has served as a Fulbright Professor in Germany (at Winthrop Bell's alma mater, the University of Göttingen), and has taught at universities in Belgium, the United States, and Canada. He was the first scholar granted exclusive access to Winthrop Bell's classified espionage papers. He lives in New Brunswick, Canada.   Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The anti-tax movement is "the most important overlooked social and political movement of the last half century", according to our guest Michael J. Graetz.  In his book The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America (Princeton UP, 2024), Graetz chronicles the movement from a fringe theory promoted by zealous outsiders using false economic claims and thinly veiled racist rhetoric to a highly organized mainstream lobbying force, funded by billionaires, that dominates and distorts politics.  Building on vague and disproven theories about "supply side" economics, the movement has undermined long-held beliefs that taxes are a reasonable price to pay for civil society, sound infrastructure, national security, and shared prosperity.  Leaders have attacked the IRS, protected tax loopholes, and pushed aggressively for tax cuts from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Also known as "trickle-down" or "voodoo" economics, these theories falsely claim that tax cuts will pay for themselves, when in fact they have led to the need for increased debt, including massive foreign debt, to pay for critical national investments.  The antitax movement has expanded to include anti-government ideas and now, as told by Graetz, threatens the nation’s social safety net, increases inequality, saps American financial strength, and undermines the status of the US dollar. In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the power to tax entails “the power to destroy.” In this book Graetz argues that it is the antitax movement itself that wields this destructive power.  Suggested reading: Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024) tell this story. The book reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The enigma of William Shakespeare's religious beliefs has long tantalized scholars and enthusiasts alike. Vernon Press's latest publication, Christian Shakespeare?: A Collection of Essays on Shakespeare in His Christian Context (Vernon Press, 2022), dives deep into this mystery. The collection of essays, edited by renowned scholars Michael Scott and Michael J. Collins, invites a discourse on the profound impact of Christian faith and the religious controversies of Shakespeare’s era on his poetry and plays. The contributors, unrestricted by any particular theoretical framework, freely explore the complex interplay between the medieval and the early modern, the Catholic and the Protestant, which colored Shakespeare’s England. This exploration reveals the openness of Shakespeare’s work to interpretation, highlighting the careful and sensitive readings by the contributors. Despite the depth of analysis, the true nature of Shakespeare’s Christianity remains as indeterminate and elusive as ever. The essays collectively capture the breadth of opinions on Shakespeare’s stances, from being ambiguously evasive to taking definitive stances on the religious and political turmoils of his time. Michael Scott, Fellow and Senior Dean at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, is a distinguished Shakespearean scholar with numerous publications under his belt, including Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist and Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction. He has delivered lectures globally, from the USA to China, enhancing the understanding of Shakespeare's works worldwide. Michael J. Collins is a Teaching Professor of English and Dean Emeritus at Georgetown University. His editorial works include Reading What’s There: Essays on Shakespeare in Honor of Stephen Booth. Collins has contributed extensively to the academic dialogue on teaching Shakespeare and reviewing Shakespearean performances. Vernon Press – Bridging Scholarly Ideas and Global Readership Vernon Press stands out as an independent publisher of scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences. Their mission is crucial — to make scholarly ideas accessible to a broader audience while maintaining high standards of originality and intellectual rigor. Through their diverse catalog, Vernon Press engages with global readers, contributing to academic and public discourse. Dessy Vassileva, the Marketing & Design expert at Vernon Press, brings a 360º multidisciplinary approach to her work at Vernon Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Free time, one of life’s most precious things, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social media for thirty minutes? Today, despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both a scarcity of free time and a disappointment in it. Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal (NYU Press, 2024) by Dr. Gary Cross offers a broad historical explanation of why our affluent society does not afford more time away from work and why that time is often unsatisfying. Dr. Cross explores the cultural, social, economic, and political history, especially of the past 250 years to understand the roots of our conceptions of free time and its use. By the end of the nineteenth century, a common expectation was that industrial innovations would lead to a progressive reduction of work time and a subsequent rise in free time devoted to self-development and social engagement. However, despite significant changes in the early twentieth century, both goals were frustrated, thus leading to the contemporary dilemma. Dr. Cross touches on leisure of all kinds, from peasant festivals and aristocratic pleasure gardens to amusement parks, movie theatres and organised sports to internet surfing, and even the use of alcohol and drugs. This wide-ranging cultural and social history explores the industrial-era origins of our modern obsession with work and productivity, but also the historical efforts to liberate time from work and cultivate free time for culture. Insightful and informative, this book is sure to help you make sense of your own relationship to free time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life (Reaktion Books, 2023) tracks the British love affair with pets over the last two centuries, showing how the kinds of pets we keep, as well as how we relate to and care for them, has changed radically. The book describes the growth of pet foods and medicines, the rise of pet shops, and the development of veterinary care, creating the pet economy. Most importantly, pets have played a powerful emotional role in families across all social classes, creating new kinds of relationships and home lives. For the first time, through a history of companion animals and the humans who lived with them, this book puts the story of the ‘pet revolution’ alongside other revolutions – industrial, agricultural, political – to highlight how animals contributed to modern British life. Jane Hamlett is professor of modern British history at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her books include Material Relations: Middle-Class Families and Domestic Interiors in England, 18501910. Julie-Marie Strange is professor of modern British History at Durham University. Her books include The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most important philosophers of all time; he was also one of the most radical and controversial. The story of Spinoza's life takes the reader into the heart of Jewish Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and, with Spinoza's exile from Judaism, into the midst of the tumultuous political, social, intellectual, and religious world of the young Dutch Republic.  This new edition of Steven Nadler's Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge UP, 2022), winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award for biography and translated into a dozen languages, is enhanced by exciting new archival discoveries about his family background, his youth, and the various philosophical, political, and religious contexts of his life and works. There is more detail about his family's business and communal activities, about his relationships with friends and correspondents, and about the development of his writings, which were so scandalous to his contemporaries. Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay, II, Professor of Philosophy, Evjue-Bascom Professor in Humanities and Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, winner of the 2000 Koret Jewish Book Award for biography with Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999) and a Pulitzer Prize finalist with Rembrandt's Jews (2004). His books have been translated into over twenty languages. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Sobibor Death Camp was the second extermination camp built by the Nazis as part of the secretive Operation Reinhardt--with intent to carry out the mass murder of Polish Jewry. Following the construction of the extermination camp at Belzec in south-eastern Poland from November 1941 to March 1942, the Nazis planned a second extermination camp at Sobibor, and the third and deadliest camp was built near the remote village of Treblinka. Sobibor was similarly designed as the first camp in Belzec, it was regarded as an 'overflow' camp for Belzec. This account of the Nazis' remorseless and relentless production line of killing at the Sobibor death camp tells of one of the worst crimes in the history of mankind. Chris Webb's painstakingly researched volume ranges from the survivors and the victims to the SS men who carried out the atrocities. The Sobibor Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Verlag, 2017) covers the construction of the death camp, the physical layout of the camp, as remembered by both the Jewish inmates and the SS staff who served there, and the personal recollections that detail the day to day experiences of the prisoners and the SS. The courageous revolt by the prisoners on October 14, 1943 is re-told by the prisoners and the German SS, with detailed accounts of the revolt and its aftermath. The post-war fate of the perpetrators, or more precisely those that were brought to trial, and information regarding the more recent history of the site itself concludes this book. There is a large photographic section of rare, previously unpublished photographs and documents from the author's private archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Chinatown has a long history in Boston. Though little documented, it represents the city's most sustained neighborhood effort to survive during eras of hostility and urban transformation. It has been wounded and transformed, slowly ceding ground; at the same time, its residents and organizations have gained a more prominent voice over their community's fate. In Forever Struggle: Activism, Identity, and Survival in Boston's Chinatown, 1880-2018 (U Massachusetts Press, 2020), Michael Liu, a lifelong activist and scholar of the community, charts its journey and efforts for survival--from its emergence during a time of immigration and deep xenophobia to the highway construction and urban renewal projects that threatened the neighborhood after World War II to its more recent efforts to keep commercial developers at bay. At the ground level, Liu depicts its people, organizations, internal battles, and varied and complex strategies against land-taking by outside institutions and public authorities. The documented courage, resilience, and ingenuity of this low-income immigrant neighborhood of color have earned it a place amongst our urban narratives. Chinatown has much to teach us about neighborhood agency, the power of organizing, and the prospects of such neighborhoods in rapidly growing and changing cities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

On today's episode of the New Books Network, we are privileged to have Professor Arie Dubnov joining us for an in-depth discussion on the multifaceted history and evolution of Zionism. Professor Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University and a preeminent scholar on Zionist thought and nationalist movements. His acclaimed works include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and the edited volumes Zionism - A View from the Outside and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford UP, 2019). In this comprehensive interview, Professor Dubnov draws from his current research project examining the interwar ties between Zionist and British imperial thinkers. He provides a sweeping analysis tracing Zionism's diverse ideological currents and how they manifested from the movement's origins through the tumultuous events surrounding Israeli statehood in 1948 and into our present era. With his profound insights, Professor Dubnov illuminates the complex social, political and intellectual forces that shaped Zionism over decades, offering a nuanced perspective on this influential nationalist ideology's evolving place in regional and global contexts. This thought-provoking discussion promises a masterclass on the rich histories and ongoing reverberations of Zionisms. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Julie Peakman investigates the sex lives of women from 1680 to 1830, the period known as the long eighteenth century. It uncovers the various experiences of women, whether mistresses, adulteresses or those involved in the sex trade. From renowned courtesans to downtrodden streetwalkers, Julie Peakman examines the multifaceted lives of these women within brothels, on stage and even behind bars. Based on new research into court transcripts, asylum records, magazines, pamphlets, satires, songs, theatre plays and erotica, we learn of the gruesome treatment of women who were sexually active outside of marriage. Dr. Peakman looks at sex from women’s points of view, undercutting the traditional image of the bawdy eighteenth century to expose a more sordid side, of women left distressed, ostracised and vilified for their sexual behaviour. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied important roles in mediaeval English society. England’s Jews revisits this neglected chapter of English history—one whose remembrance is more important than ever today, as antisemitism and other forms of racism are on the rise. In England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Dr. John Tolan tells the story of the thousands of Jews who lived in mediaeval England. Protected by the Crown and granted the exclusive right to loan money with interest, Jews financed building projects, provided loans to students, and bought and rented out housing. Historical texts show that they shared meals and beer, celebrated at weddings, and sometimes even ended up in bed with Christians. Yet Church authorities feared the consequences of Jewish contact with Christians and tried to limit it, though to little avail. Royal protection also proved to be a double-edged sword: when revolts broke out against the unpopular king Henry III, some of the rebels, in debt to Jewish creditors, killed Jews and destroyed loan records. Vicious rumours circulated that Jews secretly plotted against Christians and crucified Christian children. All of these factors led Edward I to expel the Jews from England in 1290. Paradoxically, Dr. Tolan shows, thirteenth-century England was both the theatre of fruitful interreligious exchange and a crucible of European antisemitism.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Asif Siddiqi, Professor of History at Fordham University, about the arc of his career and his wide-ranging interests and work. The pair start by discussing Siddiqi's wonderful book, The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), a history of the social and cultural trends, including a heavy dose of science fiction and mysticism, in Russia and the Soviet Union that led to Sputnik. They then talk about Siddiqi's other projects and interests from prisons to pop songs to global histories of space infrastructures. They also discuss the promises of recent turns to global and international research projects and stories in the history of technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Exploring both his life and legacy, the first full biography of William Sharman Crawford, the leading agrarian and democratic radical active in Ulster politics between the early 1830s and the 1850s. This biography places the life and ideas of William Sharman Crawford in the context of the development of radical liberalism in Ulster province over a more extended period, from his father's involvement in the Volunteers in the era of the American and French revolutions, through William's own leadership in Irish and British radical reform movements, including the Repeal Association, Chartism, and the Tenant League. It explores his attempts to reconcile Irish patriotism with the existence of the Union through the concept of "federalism," his efforts to act as an "ideal landlord" in the face of agrarian unrest and famine, and his deep commitment to attaining land and welfare reforms that he believed would empower both tenant farmers and the laboring poor. William Sharman Crawford and Ulster Radicalism (U College Dublin Press, 2023) traces the legacy of his politics through the political careers of his children James in Gladstonian liberalism and Mabel in the women's suffrage movement, both of whom sought, in common with Presbyterian allies such as James McKnight, to carry his ideas into the later nineteenth century. It concludes with the collapse of the family's radical tradition in the following generation, as his grandson Robert Gordon came to reject liberal unionism and take an active role in the Ulster Unionist movement from the 1890s. Through an assessment of the Sharman Crawford family over four generations, William Sharman Crawford and Ulster Radicalism explores the resilience of the Ulster Protestant radical tradition in the wake of the setbacks of 1798, its strengths and weaknesses, and its relations with Irish Catholic nationalism, British radicalism, the conservative landed, and Orange traditions within Ulster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

After So Much Pain and Anguish: First Letters After Liberation (Yad Vashem, 2016) comprises letters written by survivors and liberating soliders in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, reflecting their extreme mixed emotions. The survivors express their sigh of relief at liberation intertwined with the anguish of irreparable loss, and even utterances of hope for a better tomorrow. The letters articulate the first signs of life after liberation, giving moving accounts of suffering, loss and destruction. They convey cries of grief while displaying an outstretched hand from a devastated world longing to touch loved ones still whole. This collection is a raw and powerful body of firsthand testimony of the catastrophe that struck the Jewish people, forming an important record of the most horrific and ignoble period of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Covering a fascinating period of population growth, high infant mortality and deep social inequality, rapid medical advances and pseudoscientific quackery, Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain (The History Press, 2023) by Dr. Jessica Cox is the untold history of pregnancy and childbirth in Victorian Britain. During the nineteenth century, having children was frequently viewed as a woman’s central function and destiny – and yet the pregnant and postnatal body, as well as the birthing room, are almost entirely absent from the public conversation and written histories of the period. Confinement corrects this omission by exploring stories of pregnancy and motherhood across this period. Drawing on a range of contemporary sources, Dr. Cox charts the maternal experiences of women, examining fertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, maternal mortality, unwanted pregnancies, infant loss, breastfeeding, and postnatal bodies and minds. From the royal family to inhabitants of the workhouse, this absorbing history reveals what motherhood was truly like for the women of nineteenth-century Britain. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history