New Books in British Studies
1,231 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 months ago - ★★★★ - 2 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Britain about their New Books
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Episodes
David G. Morgan-Owen, “The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914” (Oxford University Press, 2017)
December 05, 2017 20:46 - 50 minutesDavid Morgan-Owen‘s The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2017) tells a complex story clearly and concisely. In the decades prior to the Great War, British preparations for defense of its commercial and imperial interests were warped by fears of an invasion of the home islands. The specter of a French, or after 1905, a German invasion prevented British officials in the Cabinet, the War Office, and the Admiralty from thinking cl...
Padraic Scanlan, “Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolutions” (Yale UP, 2017)
December 04, 2017 11:00 - 1 hourWhat was the British abolition of the slave trade like in practice? Padraic Scanlan, in his beautifully-written first book, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2017), explores the bureaucratic, economic, and military consequences of translating abolition law into lived reality for the British colony of Sierra Leone. It overturns highly moralistic notions of British antislavery and reveals the murkier, at times frenzied, and e...
Jenny Natasha and Tom Boniface-Webb, “I Was Britpopped: The A-Z of Britpop” (Valley Press, 2017)
November 30, 2017 11:00 - 1 hourI Was Britpopped: The A-Z of Britpop (Valley Press, 2017) is a comprehensive guide to the people, the bands, the places, and the events that shaped British music in the mid-to-late 1990s. Taking on the form of a A-Z guide, the book doesn’t gloss over even the most remote B-Side or bands who only fleetingly played a role in the genre. Every entry is carefully researched and expertly written to paint a picture of a music scene that was at once full of some of the most creative and inspirational...
Jack Greene, “Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait” (UVA Press, 2016)
November 29, 2017 11:00 - 56 minutesSettler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is the most recent work from distinguished historian Jack Greene. Using a treasure trove of records from the middle of the eighteenth century, Greene paints in incredible detail a societal picture of Britain’s wealthiest Caribbean colony. Greene finds much more social and economic diversity in Jamaica than traditional accounts suggest. He is also able to trace the specific contours of slavery, landed wealth, ...
Richard Power Sayeed, “1997: The Future that Never Happened (Zed Books, 2017)
November 25, 2017 19:02 - 1 hourRichard Power Sayeed’s book, 1997: The Future that Never Happened (Zed Books, 2017), is a brilliant and exhaustively researched account of the late 1990s. The subject matter covered is broad. From music to politics, from feminism to the media, it paints a picture of an era in which those living and invested in British society never had it so good. The outlook was sunny, yet this positive future never materialised. Richard Power Sayeed is a writer and documentary maker based in London. 1997:...
Amanda Bidnall, “The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945-1965” (Liverpool UP, 2017)
November 24, 2017 11:00 - 46 minutesJust after World War II, West Indians began moving to London in large numbers. The artists, writers, and musicians among them found a place to create, and they found ways to express their complex notions of belonging to both the Caribbean and to the British Empire. Amanda Bidnall‘s The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945-1965 (Liverpool University Press, 2017) traces their paths and their fortunes, their successes and their troubles. Bidnall writes against a preva...
Candace Ward, “Crossing the Line: Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation” (UVA Press, 2017)
November 07, 2017 19:04 - 34 minutesCandace Ward’s Crossing the Line: Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation (University of Virginia Press, 2017) foregrounds an understudied group of writers: white creole novelists in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. White creoles in the Caribbean were characterized as lazy, depraved, and provincial by their contemporaries in Britain, particularly amid early nineteenth-century political and social campaigns to end the institution of slavery in the Caribbean...
Rebecca Fraser, “The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America” (St. Martin’s Press, 2017)
November 07, 2017 11:00 - 1 hourRebecca Fraser is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster whose work has been published in Tatler, Vogue, The Times, and The Spectator. President of the Bronte Society for many years, she is the author of a biography of Charlotte Bronte that examines her life in the context of contemporary attitudes about women. Her last book was The Story of Britain, a single-volume history of how England was governed over the past 2000 years. Now, just in time for Thanksgiving, comes her new book, The Mayflow...
Katherine Paugh, “The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition” (Oxford UP, 2017)
October 30, 2017 10:00 - 42 minutesKatherine Paugh‘s new book The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines the crucial role that reproduction took in the evolution of slavery in the British Caribbean. Using plantation records, Paugh reconstructs the life and work routine of Doll, an enslaved midwife tasked with delivering children on a Barbadian estate. Doll’s experience and approach butted up against the desires of slave reformers at the turn of t...
Laura Lee, “Oscar’s Ghost: The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy” (Amberley, 2017)
October 24, 2017 19:27 - 35 minutesLaura Lee’s Oscar’s Ghost: The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy (Amberley Publishing, 2017) offers a detailed investigation of a conflict involving the writer and his two friends with whom he maintained sexual relations, Lord Alfred Douglas and Robert Ross. In her endeavor to disclose the root of the conflict that, as a matter of fact, marked and instigated Oscar Wilde’s decline, Laura Lee attempts to consider different perspectives, illuminating the progression of the conflict and its influen...
Julia Fawcett, “Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801” (U. Michigan Press, 2016)
October 09, 2017 21:27 - 35 minutes“How can the modern individual maintain control over his or her self-representation when the whole world seems to be watching?” This is the question that prompts Julia Fawcett‘s new book, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801 (University of Michigan Press, 2016). Drawing on a diverse range of material to analyze some of England’s earliest modern celebrities, Fawcett offers a fascinating glimpse into the paradoxes of their eighteenth-century autobiographical performances...
Linda Simon, “Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper” (Reaktion Books, 2017)
October 02, 2017 10:00 - 42 minutesWhat are your impressions when you think of the flapper? Who is she in your mind? When and where does she exist? In her new book Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper (Reaktion Books, 2017), Linda Simon tracks the historical narrative surrounding the flapper from the late-nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth century. Using sources from popular culture and from people of the time, Simon asserts that the image of the flapper did not appear out of a single historical mo...
Jane McCabe, “Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)
September 29, 2017 10:00 - 18 minutesIn her new book, Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Jane McCabe, Lecturer in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago, explores the tale of the “Kalimpong Kids,” 130 Anglo-Indian adolescents who were sent from the tea plantations in northeast India to New Zealand in the early 20th century. Their stories were for decades silenced, but using a wide range of archival sources, McCabe fills in the gaps of the...
Harry Bennett, “The Royal Navy in the Age of Austerity, 1919-1922: Naval and Foreign Policy under Lloyd George” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)
September 27, 2017 19:46 - 50 minutesGreat Britain’s victory in the First World War brought with it the competing challenges of defending an expanded empire while reducing military expenditures. In The Royal Navy in the Age of Austerity, 1919-22: Naval and Foreign Policy under Lloyd George (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Harry Bennett details how British policymakers responded to the quandary that the postwar strategic and political situation posed to them. Though triumphant against the German High Seas Fleet, the British faced the...
Andrea L. Stanton, “This is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine” (U of Texas Press, 2013)
September 14, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourDespite the recent booms in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, technology studies still remain scarce: one of the recent attempts to fill the void is Andrea L. Stanton‘s ‘This is Jerusalem Calling’: State Radio in Mandate Palestine (University of Texas Press, 2013). She weaves together different narratives to tell the story of the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS), launched in 1936 as an attempt by the mandate government to cater to different audiences, shaping middle class cul...
Aled Davies, “The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-war Britain” (Oxford UP, 2017)
September 12, 2017 10:54 - 48 minutesIn the decades following the end of the Second World War, the British economy evolved from a manufacturing-based economy to one driven by service industries, most notably finance. As Aled Davies explains in his book The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-war Britain (Oxford University Press, 2017), this shift posed a challenge to the prevailing concept of social democracy in Britain, one to which politicians, particularly those on the left, struggled...
Gareth M. Thomas, “Down’s Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic” (Routledge, 2017)
August 15, 2017 10:00 - 42 minutesDrawing on an ethnography of Down’s syndrome screening in two UK clinics, Gareth M. Thomas‘ Down’s Syndrome and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic (Routledge, 2017) explores how and why we are so invested in this practice and what effects this has on those involved. Informed by theoretical approaches that privilege the mundane and micro practices, discourses, materials, and rituals of everyday life, Downs Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Politics des...
Carla Pestana, “The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire” (Harvard UP, 2017)
August 12, 2017 11:48 - 1 hourCarla Pestana’s new book The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a rousing look at a transformative moment in Caribbean history. Pestana details the various political, economic, and religious factors that inspired England’s government, led by its new Protector Oliver Cromwell, to attempt an invasion of Spanish-held territory in the West Indies. She narrates the failed effort to take the island of Hispaniola, and the subsequent vict...
Eric Ash, “The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England” (Johns Hopkins, 2017)
August 02, 2017 22:58 - 54 minutesToday “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) describes how The Fens was transformed into the environment we know it as today. As Ash explains, the marshes supported a population that took advantage of the lush...
Jatinder Mann, “The Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s” (Peter Lang, 2016)
July 30, 2017 10:00 - 18 minutesIn his new book, The Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s (Peter Lang Publishing, 2016), Jatinder Mann, an assistant professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist University, offers a comparative look at the policies and politics of multiculturalism in Canada and Australia. He explores how the two countries navigated the transition from Britishness as the defining idea of community to multiculturalism as the defining idea of the nat...
Justin Gest, “The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality” (Oxford UP, 2016)
July 28, 2017 15:51 - 40 minutesIn our era of economic instability, rising inequality, and widespread immigration, complaints about fairness and life chances are coming from an interesting source: white people, specifically members of the working class. This group was once central to the politics of the United States and United Kingdom, and national pride and identity were synonymous with the blue-collar work these people did. Today they live in a country that they feel is no longer “for them.” They feel powerless, as minor...
Kief Hillsbery, “Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)
July 26, 2017 22:01 - 1 hourKief Hillsbery‘s Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) follows the career of Nigel Halleck, an English tax assessor in employ of the British East India Company and his travels on the Indian frontier from 1841 to 1878. Hillsbery reconstructs his ancestor’s life through his own travels to the region in the late 1970s. Believed by his family to be a gentleman gone rogue, gem smuggler, or possibly eaten by a tiger, Hillsbery unr...
Brexit, Trump, & Democracy with Thom Brooks
July 13, 2017 08:00 - 38 minutesThom Brooks is Dean of Durham Law School, Professor of Law and Government, and Associate in the Department of Philosophy in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. His academic work focuses on issues in Ethics, Criminal Law, and Public Policy. But he is widely known as an outspoken critic of the UK Citizenship Test. His most recent book is Becoming British: UK Citizenship Examined (Biteback Publishing 2016). The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humani...
David Matthews, “Medievalism: A Critical History” (Boydell and Brewer, 2017)
July 06, 2017 21:58 - 59 minutesA revealing exploration of representative modes of medievalism, Medievalism: A Critical History (Boydell & Brewer; hardcover 2015, paperback 2017), by David Matthews, examines the people, institutions, and moments that have driven societies around the world to reimagine and revive a medieval past. Eschewing shallow comprehensiveness, David Matthews instead offers a careful and extended handling of significant moments of medieval revival. From Sir Walter Scott and Cardinal Newman embracing st...
Peter Marshall, “Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation” (Yale UP, 2017)
June 19, 2017 10:05 - 50 minutesFew events in English history are as familiar to people today as the English Reformation, yet the vast amount of attention it has received can distort our understanding of it. In Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (Yale University Press, 2017), Peter Marshall surveys its development over the course of the 16th century in a way that refocuses on its fundamentals as a movement to reform the Catholicism of late medieval England. This Catholicism, as he explains, was not...
Andrew Boyd, “The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters: The Linchpin of Victory, 1935-1942” (Seaforth Publishing, 2017)
June 14, 2017 19:58 - 1 hourIn the 1930s the Royal Navy faced the problem of defending its empire in eastern Asia and Australia against the formidable naval power of Japan. How they responded to this threat in the final years of peace and the first years of the Second World War, is the subject of Andrew Boyd‘s book The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters: The Linchpin of Victory, 1935-1942 (Seaforth Publishing, 2017; distributed in the US by Naval Institute Press). As Boyd explains, the challenge was one of defending British i...
Michael J. Turner” Radicalism and Reputation: The Career of Bronterre O’Brien” (Michigan State UP, 2017)
May 31, 2017 19:16 - 56 minutesFrom humble beginnings James Bronterre O’Brien became one of the leading figures in British radical politics in the first half of the 19th century, thanks in no small measure to his skills as a journalist and writer. In Radicalism and Reputation: The Career of Bronterre O’Brien (Michigan State University Press, 2017), Michael J. Turner examines O’Brien’s ideas and his place in the milieu of the politics of his day. Born in Ireland, the young James O’Brien was a fortunate beneficiary of a prog...
Marilyn Palmer and Ian West, “Technology and the Country House” (Historic England Publishing/U.Chicago, 2016)
May 26, 2017 18:05 - 1 hourFor the aristocracy in Britain and Ireland, country house living was dependent upon the labors of men and women who performed innumerable chores involving cooking, cleaning, and the basic operation of the household. In the 18th century, however, the Industrial Revolution began to change this by introducing new devices and systems that simplified a wide range of duties. In Technology in the Country House (Historic England Publishing, 2016; distributed in the U.S. by University of Chicago Press...
Julie Gottlieb, “‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain” (Palgrave Macmilan, 2015)
May 18, 2017 10:00 - 48 minutesHistorically, foreign policy has been seen as a sphere shaped and determined by the concerns of men alone. In ‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Julie Gottlieb demonstrates the fallacy of such a view when applied to understanding how Britain responded to the growing aggressiveness of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. By highlighting the activities of politically-engaged women from across the ideological spectrum, she details the range of e...
Steve Dunn, “Securing the Narrow Sea: The Dover Patrol, 1914-1918” (Seaforth/US Naval Institute, 2017)
May 15, 2017 18:35 - 46 minutesMost accounts about the naval battles of the First World War focus upon the stalemate between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet, or the German raiders who attempted to disrupt Allied commerce. In Securing the Narrow Sea: The Dover Patrol 1914-1918 (Seaforth Publishing, 2017; distributed in the US by Naval Institute Press), Steve Dunn focuses on the often overlooked service of the British naval forces stationed in the English Channel during the conflict. The eclectic colle...
Marie Hicks, “Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing” (MIT Press, 2017)
March 28, 2017 10:00 - 30 minutesHow did gender relations change in the computing industry? And how did the UK go from leading the world to having an all but extinct computer industry by the 1970s? In Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017). Marie Hicks, an Assistant Professor of History at the Illinois Institute of Technology, offers a detailed and comprehensive overview of this radical social change. Based on rich and detailed archival and interview ...
Kate Murphy, “Behind the Wireless: A History of Early Women at the BBC” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
March 22, 2017 17:57 - 50 minutesFrom the early days of the BBC in 1922, women were everywhere in the broadcasting company’s offices. They were absent, however, argues Dr. Kate Murphy from most of the historiography devoted to this illustrious institution. In this vibrant monograph, Murphy sets out to find these hidden female figures. A former producer of the long-running program Woman’s Hour and currently a Senior Lecturer at Bournemouth University in the UK, Murphy is cognizant both of women’s contribution to the BBC and o...
Tony Collins, “The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby” (Bloomsbury, 2015)
March 19, 2017 15:26 - 53 minutesThe 2017 Six Nations rugby tournament concluded this weekend. England successfully defended its championship, despite losing the last match against a strong Ireland side in Dublin–England’s only loss of the competition. Meanwhile, the new Super Rugby season just began, with clubs traveling between Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and now Argentina and Japan. Later this year, women’s sides from twelve countries, including Spain, Canada, and Hong Kong, will compete in the Women’s Rugby Wor...
Phoebe Chow, “Britain’s Imperial Retreat from China, 1900-1931” (Routledge, 2016)
March 07, 2017 11:04 - 46 minutesAt the start of the twentieth century Britain’s relationship with China was defined by the economic and political dominance Britain exerted in the country as an imperial power, a dominance that would ebb over the next three decades. In Britain’s Imperial Retreat from China, 1900-1931 (Routledge, 2017), Phoebe Chow describes British views of China during this period and the role that they played in the declension of their imperial presence. Challenging traditional accounts of this process, Cho...
Glyne Griffith, “The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016)
March 07, 2017 11:00 - 50 minutesThe BBC radio program “Caribbean Voices” aired for fifteen years and introduced writers like George Lamming, Louise Bennett, Sam Selvon and others to listeners on both sides of the Atlantic. Glyne Griffith’s The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016) is one of a few detailed studies of this program and the people and institutions that made it possible. Griffith makes important arguments about the combined force of letters, texts and b...
Ryan Vieira, “Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the British World” (Oxford UP, 2015)
February 24, 2017 18:00 - 49 minutesHow did the idea of time change during the nineteenth century? In Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the British World (Oxford University Press, 2015) Ryan Vieira, a sessional lecturer at McMaster University, explores Parliament in the nineteenth century to understand both the bureaucratic structures and the individual parliamentarians’ experiences of time. The understanding of time was shaped by changes in the ideas of industriousnes...
Harris Beider, “White Working-Class Voices: Multiculturalism, Community-Building, and Change” (Policy Press, 2015)
February 20, 2017 11:00 - 23 minutesHarris Beider is the author of White Working-Class Voices: Multiculturalism, Community-Building, and Change (Policy Press, 2015). Beider is chair in Community Cohesion at the Center for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations, Coventry University, UK, and visiting professor at Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs. Many of the same socio-economic changes that scholars have associated with the rise of President Donald Trump in the US have been associated with recent politi...
Helen Glew, “Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900-1955” (Manchester UP, 2016)
February 18, 2017 11:00 - 37 minutesWhat role has gender played in government institutions? In Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council 1900-1955, Helen Glew, a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Westminster uses detailed case studies of the Post Office, London County Council, and the British Civil Service to explain this crucial question. The book explores the social, economic and cultural setting for the idea of ‘women’s work’ in British state bureaucracy, l...
Nancy Weiss Malkiel, ‘Keep the Damned Women Out’: The Struggle for Coeducation” (Princeton UP, 2016)
February 13, 2017 11:00 - 44 minutesWithin the context of the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, elite institutions of higher education began to feel pressure to open their doors to women. In ‘Keep the Damned Women Out’: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton University Press, 2015), an expansive study in institutional decision making, Nancy Weiss Malkiel analyzes how institutions ultimately decided to approach coeducation and what their institutions would ultimately look like following this radical change. By using examp...
Dave Gosse, “Abolition and Plantation Management in Jamaica, 1807-1838” (U. of the West Indies Press, 2012)
January 30, 2017 21:10 - 34 minutesDave Gosse’s recent book Abolition and Plantation Management in Jamaica, 1807-1838 (University of the West Indies Press, 2012), looks at a crucial period in Jamaican history. The time between the abolition of Britain’s slave trade in 1807 and the end of slavery and the apprenticeship system in 1838 saw dramatic attempts by plantation owners and managers to continue grinding profit out of their enslaved workers. Gosse takes on previous assumptions about the efficiency and success of those plan...
Helen Rappaport, “Victoria: The Heart and Mind of a Young Queen” (Harper Design, 2017)
January 10, 2017 23:21 - 57 minutesThe term historical fiction covers a wide range from what the mystery writer Josephine Tey once dubbed “history with conversation” to outright invention shading into fantasy. But behind every story set in the past lies the past itself, as re-created by scholars from the available evidence. This interview features Helen Rappaport, whose latest work reveals the historical background behind the Masterpiece Theater miniseries Victoria, due to air in the United States this month. Rappaport served ...
Owen McGee, “Arthur Griffith” (Merrion Press, 2015)
December 23, 2016 10:44 - 1 hourAs the founder of Sinn Fin and a leading architect of Irish independence, Arthur Griffith ranks as one of the founding fathers of modern Ireland. In his book Arthur Griffith (Merrion Press, 2015), Owen McGee offers a biography of the writer and patriot framed within the context of the Irish nationalist movement. The son of a Dublin printer, Griffith was active in nationalist politics at an early age. His own experience in publishing led Griffith to start his own review journals, which served ...
David B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner, eds. “Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England” (Duquesne UP, 2016)
December 19, 2016 11:19 - 45 minutesCulinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2016) is a collection of essays that offers new dimensions for reading and understanding Shakespeare’s plays. Responding to a rich scholarship on Shakespeare, the authors shift the centers and margins of literary discourse to illuminate aspects that were previously dismissed as insignificant. In Culinary Shakespeare, food is theorized as a territory where multiple dimensions intersect and overlap...
Matt Houlbrook, “Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook” (U. of Chicago Press 2016)
December 19, 2016 11:17 - 42 minutesHow should we understand the interwar years in Britain? In Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (University of Chicago Press, 2016) Matt Houlbrook, Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham,tells the fascinating and complex story of Netley Lucas, a character whose fragmented and complex story offers clues to the social changes of the period. Netley’s career as confidence trickster, fraudulent journalist and editor, and creator of...
Richard Griffiths, “What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-1945” (Routledge, 2016)
December 18, 2016 11:00 - 51 minutesDuring the mid- to late 1930s, a small but socially prominent group of right-wing Britons took a public stance in support of the Nazi regime in Germany. While many of them curtailed their activities upon Britain’s declaration of war in 1939, as Richard Griffiths reveals in his book What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45 (Routledge, 2016) some of them continued to support their nation’s declared enemy in a variety of ways. Refuting ex post facto ...
Michael Brown, “The Irish Enlightenment” (Harvard UP, 2015)
December 13, 2016 14:03 - 51 minutesTraditionally histories of the Enlightenment era exclude Ireland in the belief that the movement left little impression on developments. In The Irish Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2016), Michael Brown challenges this assumption, demonstrating how the ideas and themes of the Enlightenment had a considerable impact upon the history of the country. He begins by examining how the Enlightenment entered the public discourse confessionally, though the debates taking place within the Presb...
Julie Holcomb, “Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy” (Cornell UP, 2016)
December 13, 2016 14:02 - 1 hourThe question of how we should act when facing something gravely immoral is a difficult one. This is particularly true when that immorality touches upon our everyday life. Such was the issue that Quakers, and others, faced with the question of goods produced by slaves. Was consuming goods, such as sugar or cotton clothing manufactured by slaves incompatible with abolitionism? Could the refusal to consume such goods contribute to the liberation of slaves? In her new book, Moral Commerce: Quaker...
Tom Mills, “The BBC: Myth of a Public Service” (Verso, 2016)
December 02, 2016 20:39 - 42 minutesThe BBC is often thought to be a great, impartial, defender of British values and society. In The BBC: Myth of a Public Service (Verso, 2016), Tom Mills, a lecturer in Sociology at Aston University, re-reads the history of the BBC to offer a more problematic status for the corporation, as an adjunct of British state power. The book uses examples from the General Strike in Britain, through war and economics reporting, to the vetting of left wing political attitudes within the Corporation, to t...
Coll Thrush, “Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire” (Yale UP, 2016)
November 23, 2016 23:04 - 1 hourColl Thrush’s new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. The book is organized around domains of entangleme...
Coll Thrush, “Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire” (Yale UP, 2016)
November 23, 2016 23:04 - 1 hourColl Thrush’s new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. The book is organized around domains of entangleme...