NBN Book of the Day
1,103 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 11 ratingsThe "NBN Book of the Day" features the most timely and interesting author interviews from the New Books Network delivered to you every weekday.
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Episodes
Jeffrey Angles, ed., "Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again: The Original Novellas by Shigeru Kayama" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
September 21, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesGodzilla emerged from the sea to devastate Tokyo in the now-classic 1954 film, produced by Tōhō Studios and directed by Ishirō Honda, creating a global sensation and launching one of the world’s most successful movie and media franchises. Awakened and transformed by nuclear weapons testing, Godzilla serves as a terrifying metaphor for humanity’s shortsighted destructiveness: this was the intent of Shigeru Kayama, the science fiction writer who drafted the 1954 original film and its first sequ...
Molly Ladd-Taylor, "Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
September 20, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesBetween 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare system. Tracing Minnesota's eugenics program from it...
Maria Smilios, "The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)
September 19, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesNew York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage. In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people’s darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themsel...
Ian Patel, "We're Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire" (Verso, 2021)
September 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhat are the origins of the hostile environment against immigrants in the UK? In We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (Verso, 2021), Patel retells Britain's recent history in an often shocking account of state racism that still resonates today. In a series of post-war immigration laws from 1948 to 1971, arrivals from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa to Britain went from being citizens to being renamed immigrants. In the late 1960s, British officials drew upon an ...
Rachel Chrastil, "Bismarck's War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe" (Basic Book, 2023)
September 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAmong the conflicts that convulsed Europe during the nineteenth century, none was more startling and consequential than the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Deliberately engineered by Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the war succeeded in shattering French supremacy, deposing Napoleon III, and uniting a new German Empire. But it also produced brutal military innovations and a precarious new imbalance of power that together set the stage for the devastating world wars of the next century...
Christopher F. Zurn, "Splitsville USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking Up the United States" (Routledge, 2023)
September 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAt the end of the day, I have faith in the wisdom of democracy: the idea that good political solutions only arise from widely dispersed discussion, debate and decision among the broadest group of those affected. This book is intended, then, not as a finalized blueprint or technical report delivered from on high but as a conversation opener for democratic debate among my fellow citizens. – Christopher F. Zurn, Splitsville USA (2023) Splitsville USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking Up the Un...
Zachary Parolin, "Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from COVID-19" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2023)
September 15, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutesZachary Parolin's book Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from COVID-19 (Russell Sage Foundation, 2023) is interested in poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., as well as what the pandemic teaches us about how to think about poverty, and policies designed to reduce it, well after the pandemic subsides. Four main questions guide the book's focus. First, how did poverty influence the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic? Second, what was the role of government income support in...
Gregory Cahill, "The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen" (Life Drawn, 2023)
September 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen (Life Drawn, 2023) is very well-reseraech graphic novel based on the life of beloved Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea, whose “Golden Voice” helped define Cambodia’s Golden Age of music until her mysterious disappearance in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Developed in partnership with Sothea’s family. There is a saying in Cambodia: Music is the soul of a nation. Perhaps no one embodied that spirit more than Ros Serey Sot...
Michèle Lamont, "Seeing Others: How Recognition Works-And How It Can Heal a Divided World" (Atria, 2023)
September 13, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesHow can we challenge and change inequalities? In Seeing Others: How Recognition Works— and How It Can Heal a Divided World (Atria, 2023), Michele Lamont, Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, at Harvard University, explores this question by empirically substantiating the concept of recognition. Using a huge range of case studies, interview data, as well as wealth of cross-disciplinary research, the book shows t...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
The Future of Secularization: A Discussion with Ryan Cragun
September 11, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesThe statement ‘we live in a secular age’ is open to the obvious challenge that in some parts of the word, religion is a growing force in society. And even in places such as the US, religious activists seem to have growing influence – as the recent US Supreme Court decision about abortion suggests. So, is this actually a secular age? Ryan Cragun is a co-author (with Isabella Kasselstrand and Phil Zuckerman) of Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society (NYU Press, 2023) – listen to him in con...
Sarah Ruden, "Vergil: The Poet's Life" (Yale UP, 2023)
September 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became a living legend. But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure; we know that he was born into a modest rural family, that he led a private and solitary life, and that, in spite of poor health and unusual emotional vulnerabilities, he worked tirelessly to achieve exquisite new effects in verse. Verg...
Ryan Tucker Jones, "Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
September 09, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesThe Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today’s oceans. In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales’ destruction. ...
Shai M. Dromi and Samuel D. Stabler, "Moral Minefields: How Sociologists Debate Good Science" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
September 08, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesWhere does morality fit into contemporary social science? In Moral Minefields: How Sociologists Debate Good Science (U Chicago Press, 2023), Shai Dromi, an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at Harvard University and Samuel Stabler Associate Teaching Professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University, draw on pragmatist theory to offer insights as to how sociology can avoid moral myopia and be value pluralistic. The book offers rich case studies of key fields and d...
Michael S. Roth, "The Student: A Short History" (Yale UP, 2023)
September 07, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesIn The Student: A Short History (Yale UP, 2023), Michael S. Roth narrates a vivid and dynamic history of students, exploring some of the principal models for learning that have developed in very different contexts, from the sixth century BCE to the present. Beginning with the followers of Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus and moving to medieval apprentices, students at Enlightenment centers of learning, and learners enrolled in twenty-first-century universities, he explores how students have bee...
Stephen Ramsay, "On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
September 06, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesStephen Ramsey's On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) is a witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities. Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English departments and the mechanization of teaching have peppered popular media. Stephen Ramsay’s On the Dig...
Mike Pesca, "Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History" (Twelve, 2018)
September 05, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesNo announcer ever proclaimed: "Up Rises Frazier!" "Havlicek commits the foul, trying to steal the ball!" or "The Giants Lose the Pennant, The Giants Lose The Pennant!" Such moments are indelibly etched upon the mind of every sports fan. Or rather, they would be, had they happened. Sports are notoriously games of inches, and when we conjure the thought of certain athletes - like Bill Buckner or Scott Norwood - we can't help but apply a mental tape measure to the highlight reels of our minds. P...
Alexander Stille, "The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune" (FSG, 2023)
September 04, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesIn the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill was introduced and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders, Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, wanted to start a revolution, one grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from the expectations of society, and the revolution, they felt, needed to begin at home. Dismantling the nuclear family—and monoga...
John Szwed, "Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith" (FSG, 2023)
September 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWho was Harry Smith? Was he an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter? Was he a charlatan? A genius? Was he a moocher, a schmuck, a bum? As John Szwed's Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (FSG, 2023) reveals, Smith was all of these and more. Best known for editing The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smith was also a pioneer in experimental film who Jonas Mekas considered one of the leading lights of the New American Cinema. He created paintings that attempted to transcribe be...
Ari Ezra Waldman, "Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
September 02, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesIn Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ari Ezra Waldman exposes precisely how the tech industry conducts its ongoing crusade to undermine our privacy. With research based on interviews with scores of tech employees and internal documents outlining corporate strategies, Waldman reveals that companies don't just lobby against privacy law; they also manipulate how we think about privacy, how their employees approach their work, and how t...
Kathryn J. Edin et al., "The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America" (Mariner Books, 2023)
September 01, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesA sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearl...
Sarah R. Coleman, "The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2023)
August 31, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesSarah Coleman, an historian at Texas State University, is the author of an important and topical book about immigration policy in the United States. The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2023) focuses much less on the often-discussed physical border between the United States and other countries, and more so on the internal touchpoints where immigration federalism takes place. Coleman does a number of things in this book, including providing a fascinati...
Mikkel Dack, "Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany: The Fragebogen Questionnaire and Political Screening During the Allied Occupation" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
August 30, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesIn the wake of the Second World War, the victorious Allied armies implemented a radical program to purge Nazism from Germany and preserve peace in Europe. Between 1945 and 1949, twenty million political questionnaires, or Fragebögen, were distributed by American, British, French, and Soviet armies to anxious Germans in positions of influence who had to prove their non-Nazi status to gain employment. Drafted by idealistic university professors and social scientists, these surveys came to defin...
On “Henry Kissinger and His World” with author Barry Gewen
August 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn my talk with Barry Gewen on his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (W. W. Norton, 2020), we explore the disparate influences that shaped Kissinger as both an intellectual and as a practitioner of power. Our conversation touches on Kissinger’s upbringing in a German-Jewish community in Bavaria at the time of Hitler’s rise to power and pivots to an understanding of Kissinger’s Realism as his pessimistic yet unwavering approach to foreign affairs and exige...
David Waldstreicher, "The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence" (FSG, 2023)
August 28, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThy Power, O Liberty, make strong the weak, And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak. At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book in English by a person of African descent and the third book of poetry by a North American Woman. She was a poet but also a political actor and celebrity – the most famous African in North America and Europe during the era of the American Revolution. George Washington wrote to her. Thomas Jefferson ridiculed her. In The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley...
Gary Smith, "Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)
August 27, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesThere is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. Gary Smith's book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science (Oxford UP, 2023) argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing ...
Chris Dietz, "Self-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender" (Routledge, 2022)
August 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourSelf-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender (Routledge, 2023) is a socio-legal study that offers a critique of what it means to self-declare with regard to legal gender. Based on empirical research conducted in Denmark, the book engages in some of the most controversial issues surrounding trans and gender diverse rights. The theoretical analysis draws upon legal consciousness, affect theory, vulnerability and governmentality, to cross jurisdictional boundaries between law and medicine...
Lawrence Goldman, "Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2022)
August 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2022) is a study of how such data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, from the methods of natural sc...
Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates, "Noah's Arkive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
August 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAt a moment when the world has tipped over into irreversible violence and corruption, a divinity contacts a righteous man. The man is directed to build a giant ship and bring aboard animals, who will spend an indefinite amount of time living, sleeping, and eating alongside Noah and his family. The rain begins to fall, and these survivors take refuge on the ark. After forty days, the survivors disembark and then have to figure out how to create a new settlement as the waters recede. This crypt...
Cara Fitzpatrick, "The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America" (Basic Books, 2023)
August 23, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesAmerica has relied on public schools for 150 years, but the system is increasingly under attack. With declining enrollment and diminished trust in public education, policies that steer tax dollars into private schools have grown rapidly. To understand how we got here, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America (Basic Books, 2023) argues, we must look back at the turbulent history of school choice. Cara Fitzpatrick uncovers the long journey of school ch...
Postscript: Guns, Violence, and the Law: How Federal Courts are Trying to Figure Out the Second Amendment
August 22, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesTwo blockbuster cases came down in June of 2022. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen substantially expanded Second Amendment rights and limited the power of states to regulate concealed carry of firearms. Bruen affected thousands of Americans who have had their laws overturned and radically changed the method by which federal judges evaluate firearms law. Two remarkable scholars of the Second Amendment and firearms law explain how l...
Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein, "We've Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care" (Penguin, 2023)
August 21, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesFew of us need convincing that the American health insurance system needs reform. But many of the existing proposals focus on expanding one relatively successful piece of the system or building in piecemeal additions. These proposals miss the point. As the Stanford health economist Liran Einav and the MIT economist and MacArthur Genius Amy Finkelstein argue, our health care system was never deliberately designed, but rather pieced together to deal with issues as they became politically releva...
Peter Moore, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream (1740–1776)" ( FSG, 2023)
August 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy--and contested--as this, a small deletion matters. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a long chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and back. The pre...
Samuel Moyn, "Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times" (Yale UP, 2023)
August 19, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesBy the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude ...
The Future of Traditionalism: A Discussion with Mark J. Sedgwick
August 18, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesTwenty years ago, it seemed Traditionalism was an esoteric and irrelevant set of beliefs. Since then, powerful people sympathetic to its ideas have overturned that perception. In the US, Russia, and Brazil powerful presidential advisers have drawn on traditionalism to disastrous effect – the Trump presidency and the war in Ukraine both owe something to traditionalism. Mark Sedgwick has written Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (Oxford UP, 2023) and he has been thi...
Don J. Wyatt, "Slavery in East Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 17, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesToday I talked to Don J. Wyatt about his book Slavery in East Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022). In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively. Slavery in medieval East Asia shared with the West the commonplace assumption that nearly a...
Lauren S. Foley, "On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies" (NYU Press, 2023)
August 16, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesDiversity in higher education is under attack as the Supreme Court limits the use of race-conscious admissions practices at American colleges and universities. In On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies (NYU Press, 2023), Lauren S. Foley sheds light on our current crisis, exploring the past, present, and future of this contentious policy. From Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-twentieth century to the current Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvar...
Benjamin Y. Fong, "Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge" (Verso, 2023)
August 15, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesBenjamin Y. Fong is author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, which was just released in July, 2023 by Verso Books. Ben is an honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University, and his work has appeared in Jacobin, Catalyst, and the New York Times. Previously, Ben’s work focused on the (usually negative) effects of neoliberal capitalism, writing about NGOs, labor leaders, and healt...
Nicholas Tochka, "Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America" (Oxford UP, 2023)
August 14, 2023 04:00 - 52 minutesProgressive and libertarian, anti-Communist and revolutionary, Democratic and Republican, quintessentially American but simultaneously universal. By the late 1980s, rock music had acquired a dizzying array of political labels. These claims about its political significance shared one common thread: that the music could set you free. Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America (Oxford UP, 2023) explains how Americans came to believe they had learned t...
Mark Edele, "Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story" (Melbourne University, 2023)
August 13, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutes"That Russia and Ukraine have diverged politically so radically since 1991 is partially due to their position vis-à-vis the imploded empire they emerged from," writes Mark Edele in Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (Melbourne University Publishing, 2023). As its subtitle suggests, this short work - "a book by an outsider written for outsiders" - has big ambitions to explain the immediate, long-, and very long-term reasons for the war. How did two so similar yet so different nation...
Kris Marsh, "The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
August 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDrawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, Kris Marsh's The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class (Cambridge UP, 2023) centers on the voices and lifestyles of members of the Black middle class who are single and living alone (SALA). While much has been written about both the Black middle class and the rise of singlehood, this book represents a first foray into bridging these two concepts. In studying these intersection...
Michael Ruse, "Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2017)
August 11, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through ...
Chris Wiggins and Matthew L Jones, "How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms" (Norton, 2023)
August 10, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesFrom facial recognition―capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents―to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans and who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn’t just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search. In How Data H...
Andrii Portnov, "Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)
August 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAndrii Portnov's Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City (Academic Studies Press, 2022) is the first English-language synthesis of the history of Dnipro (until 2016 Dnipropetrovsk, until 1926 Katerynoslav) locates the city in a broader regional, national, and transnational context and explores the interaction between global processes and everyday routines of urban life. The history of a place (throughout its history called ‘new Athens’, ‘Ukrainian Manchester’, ‘the Brezhnev`s capital’...
Steven Press, "Blood and Diamonds: Germany's Imperial Ambitions in Africa" (Harvard UP, 2021)
August 08, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourSince the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove "conflict diamonds" from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds--gems extracted from war zones--has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation. In Blood and Diamonds: Germany's Imperia...
Philip Roscoe, "How to Build a Stock Exchange: The Past, Present and Future of Finance" (Bristol UP, 2023)
August 07, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesWhy does the financial sector matter? In How to Build a Stock Exchange: The Past, Present and Future of Finance (Bristol UP, 2023), Philip Roscoe, a Professor of Management at the University of St Andrews, explores the history of the London Stock Exchange as part of a broader examination of the role of finance in the modern world. Richly detailed, including personal reflections as well as interviews and historical analysis, the book covers the technologies, personalities, and key events that ...
Mike Rothschild, "Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories" (Melville House, 2023)
August 06, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesIn Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories (Melville House, 2023), Mike Rothschild delves into the history of the conspiracy industry around the Rothschild family—from the "pamphlet wars" of Paris in the 1840s to the dankest pits of the internet today. Journalist and conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild, who isn't related to the family, sorts out myth from reality to find the truth about these conspiracy theories and their spreaders. Who were the Rothschi...
The Future of Space Travel: A Discussion with Douglas C. Ligor
August 05, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesThe expansion of space travel is much discussed but always seems subject to delay. Why is that and when will it happen on a much larger scale? Douglas Ligor has been considering that issue for the Rand corporation – and he talks to Owen Bennett-Jones about the prospects for space travel. Ligor is co-author of Assessing the Readiness for Human Commercial Spaceflight Safety Regulations (Rand, 2023) and International Space Traffic Management: Charting a Course for Long-Term Sustainability (Rand,...
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, "Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America" (UNC Press, 2023)
August 04, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesTwentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of U.S. policy from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses. After Wo...
Rudi Matthee, "Angels Tapping at the Wine-Shop's Door: A History of Alcohol in the Islamic World" (Oxford UP, 2023)
August 03, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesWhen meeting an expatriate friend on my first trip to Dubai, the host at the restaurant where we were meeting quickly ushered me up to the second floor. For foreigners, he said—before handing me a wine list. Dubai’s tolerance of alcohol is a more formalized version of Muslim tolerance—and clandestine drinking—of alcohol that dates back to its very inception, despite religious commands to the contrary. Professor Rudi Matthee tells that story in Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop's Door: A History...