New Books in Early Modern History
1,098 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 4 ratingsInterviews with scholars of the Early Modern World about the new books
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Katharine Gerbner, “Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018)
May 16, 2018 10:00 - 47 minutesCould slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In her recent book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Katharine Gerbner asks these questions as she traces how religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the early modern period, as Anglicans, Quakers, and Moravians settled and missionized the Protestant Atl...
Kathlene Baldanza, “Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
May 07, 2018 10:00 - 31 minutesIn Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Kathlene Baldanza explores the complex diplomatic exchanges between China and Vietnam from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Drawing on vast material of both Chinese and Vietnamese primary sources, Baldanza challenges conventional narratives that focus... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ji-Young Lee, “China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination” (Columbia UP, 2017)
May 03, 2018 10:00 - 35 minutesJi-Young Lee’s book investigates the changing nature of tribute relations during the Ming and High Qing between a dominant China and its less powerful neighbors, Korea and Japan. China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (Columbia University Press, 2017) reexamines the theory and literature of the tribute system,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alexus McLeod, “Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time” (Lexington Books, 2018)
April 16, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourThe ancient Maya are popularly known for their calendar, but their concept of time and the metaphysics surrounding that conception are not. In Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time (Lexington Books, 2018), Alexus McLeod reconstructs an ancient Mayan metaphysical system based on key texts and other artifacts plus using analogies with ancient Chinese philosophical thought. On his view, the Maya held that we can understand everything in temporal terms but that everything does not reduce ...
Jonathan Daly, “Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin” (Bloomsbury, 2018)
April 10, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourJonathan Daly is a professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His newest book Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (Bloomsbury, 2018), provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the criminal justice system in Russia from the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ruth von Bernuth, “How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition” (NYU Press, 2017)
April 02, 2018 10:00 - 32 minutesIn How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. The Chelm stories surrounding the ‘wise men’ (fools) of this town ...
Amelia Glaser, “Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising” (Stanford UP, 2015)
March 30, 2018 10:00 - 31 minutesThe cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name. Inside the book, twelve contributing authors including Dr. Glaser, approach this legendary yet enigmatical figure from a number of perspectives—Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Western—across the centuries, with plenty of overlap, assembling together a sin...
Robert Darnton, “A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2018)
March 15, 2018 10:10 - 1 hourFive decades ago, a young scholar named Robert Darnton followed up on a footnote that took him to the archives of the “Typographical Society of Neuchatel”(S.T.N.) in Switzerland, not far from the French border. Many years, and thousands of documents later, Professor Robert Darnton has published a new book, A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018). Apart from illuminating the everyday life of the trade that enabled and sh...
Yair Mintzker, “The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew” (Princeton UP, 2017)
March 12, 2018 10:00 - 53 minutesJoseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial and condemned to death for his “misdeeds,” and on February 4, 1738, was hanged in front of a large crowd just outside Stuttgart. He was not allowed to give testimony at his own trial and left no written record of the case; we know little of his biography. Yet he remains an iconic figure to this day, not only as emblematic of the relationship bet...
Daniel B. Schwartz, “The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image” (Princeton UP, 2012)
March 02, 2018 11:00 - 59 minutesBenedito/Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1623-1677) lived at the crossroads of Dutch, scholastic, and Jewish worlds. Excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at 23, his works would later be put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. He was a heretic. And yet, he was and continues to be seen by many as perhaps the hero of the early modern period. A figure alienated by the structures that defined his life, Spinoza has been understood, by Jews and non-Jews alike, to have expres...
Taisu Zhang, “The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship Property in Preindustrial China and England” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
February 27, 2018 11:00 - 58 minutesTaisu Zhang ties together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics in The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. Late Imperial and Republican China (1860-1949) was dominated of Neo-Confucian social hierarchies, under which advanced age and generational seniority were...
Larry Wolff, “The Singing Turk” (Stanford UP, 2016)
February 19, 2018 11:00 - 43 minutesIn The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford University Press, 2016), Larry Wolff takes us into that distinctly European art form, the opera, to show us the reflection of European ideas of Ottoman Turkey in the modern period. Beginning in 1683 when Ottoman guns shook the walls of Vienna, through a long eighteenth century, and up to Napoleon’s military supremacy in the nineteenth, when Turkish conquest ...
Andrew Frank, “Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami” (UP of Florida, 2017)
February 14, 2018 11:00 - 39 minutesIn this interview, we discuss Andrew Frank‘s most recent book, Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami (University Press of Florida, 2017). The book is a concise and authoritative history of the region where modern-day Miami is located. Before the Pioneers, begins thousands of years in the past and places great emphasis on understanding the role that native people played in the history of south Florida. Borrowing extensively from archaeology, Before the Pione...
Alfred Ivry, “Maimonides’ ‘Guide of the Perplexed’: A Philosophical Guide” (University of Chicago, 2016)
February 13, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourAlfred Ivry‘s book, Maimonides’ ‘Guide of the Perplexed’: A Philosophical Guide (University of Chicago, 2016) is the only modern commentary in English to explicate Maimonides’ summa The Guide of the Perplexed in its entirety. In so doing, it stands as a monument to both The Guide and to a career spent studying it. The book begins with an introduction that outlines its main arguments and method, and with chapters on Maimonides biography and intellectual context. It then divides the Guide into ...
Benjamin R. Gampel, “Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
February 06, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourBenjamin R. Gampel‘s award winning volume Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is the first total history of a lesser known period in Jewish history, overshadowed by the Spanish expulsion of 1492 which it would come to foreshadow. Over the course of ten months, Jews across large parts of the Iberian peninsula were murdered or forced to convert to Christianity, and entire communities were decimated—the intensity and durat...
Emily C. Nacol, “An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain” (Princeton UP, 2016)
January 29, 2018 11:00 - 41 minutesEmily C. Nacol has written a fascinating interrogation of the idea of risk, the concept of vulnerability, and the evolution of probabilistic thinking as conceived of and explored by four of the preeminent British thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nacol’s book, An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain (Princeton University Press, 2016) examines the political, economic, and epistemological works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Ea...
Monica Mattfeld, “Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship” (Penn State UP, 2017)
January 19, 2018 12:20 - 32 minutesMonica Mattfeld’s Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State University Press, 2017) explores the complex relationship between men and their horses, and reflects upon how these interactions defined a man’s gendered and political positions within society. Focusing on training manuals, memoirs, images, satires, and other rich materials produced by some of the periods most influential equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of hors...
Anthony J. La Vopa, “The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures” (Penn Press, 2017)
December 19, 2017 11:00 - 46 minutesAnthony J. La Vopa is professor emeritus of history at North Carolina State University. His book, The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), is an erudite intellectual history that explores how cultivated men and women in early modern France and Britain thought about the intellectual capacities of each sex. The manly and feminine attributes of the mind were tied to bodily and social concepts of female weakness and sentiment ...
Sam White, “A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America” (Harvard UP, 2017)
December 15, 2017 13:22 - 54 minutesSam White’s brand new book A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Harvard University Press, 2017) turns the tales we learned in grade school about early European colonization of North America upside-down. In the last decades of the 16th and first decades of the 17th century, three empires—Spain, France and England—each sought to establish new colonial projects on the continent of North America. They had the misfortune to embark on these projects at the m...
James F. Brooks, “Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre” (W.W. Norton and Co., 2016)
December 05, 2017 21:16 - 1 hourJames F. Brooks, UC Santa Barbara Professor of History and Anthropology and the William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow at Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, offers a scrupulously researched investigation of the mysterious massacre of Hopi Indians at Awat’ovi as well as the event’s echo through American history in Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016). The Hopi community of Awat’ovi existed peacefully on Arizona’s Antelo...
Catherine Zuckert, “Machiavelli’s Politics” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)
November 30, 2017 11:00 - 1 hourCatherine Zuckert‘s new book, Machiavelli’s Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2017), systematically analyzes all the texts that Machiavelli wrote, exploring each text individually, but also as part of Machiavelli’s more expansive teaching as a philosopher, but more precisely as a philosopher of politics. Zuckert examines not only Machiavelli’s own work, but she also integrates the vast scholarship of Machiavelli’s work, exploring others scholars assessment of Machiavelli’s particular pro...
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...
Adam Gaiser, “Shurat Legends, Ibadi Identities: Martyrdom, Asceticism and the Making of an Early Islamic Community” (U. South Carolina Press, 2016)
October 18, 2017 15:07 - 40 minutesAdam Gaiser‘s majestic new book Shurat Legends, Ibadi Identities: Martyrdom, Asceticism and the Making of an Early Islamic Community (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), treats readers to a dazzling analysis of a wide range of Shurat/Kharijite texts centered on the themes of martyrdom, asceticism, and the body. Providing a rare and sympathetic window into this often misunderstood tradition, Gaiser presents a compelling and nuanced account of ways in which discursive concepts, construct...
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...
Manan Ahmed Asif, “A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia” (Harvard UP, 2017)
August 06, 2017 13:15 - 1 hourIn contemporary South Asia, the question of Muslim origins emerges in school textbooks, political dialogues, or at tourist or pilgrimage cites. The repeated narrative revolves around the foreign Muslim leader, Muhammad bin Qasim, and his conquest of Sind in the year 712. Manan Ahmed Asif, Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, provides a critical interrogation of this narrative in A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 201...
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...
Elias Sacks, “Moses Mendelssohn’s Living Script: Philosophy, Practice, History, Judaism” (Indiana UP, 2016)
July 31, 2017 10:00 - 38 minutesThe work of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), one of Judaism’s great philosophers and defenders, has nonetheless defied easy categorization or definitive depiction. While advocating for the granting of full rights to the Jews of Germany, Mendelssohn also was cast in the role of defender of the faith and advocate for continued obedience to what he termed “ceremonial law” or “divine legislation.” In his new book, Moses Mendelssohn’s Living Script: Philosophy, Practice, History, Judaism (Indiana Un...
Did the Protestant Reformation Have to Happen?
July 21, 2017 12:24 - 56 minutesIn the second podcast of Arguing History, historians Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie address the question of whether the Protestant Reformation, an event which transformed Christianity in the Western world, was an inevitable event. This they do by considering the origins of the Reformation within the context of the contemporary... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Peter Marshall, “Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation” (Yale UP, 2017)
June 19, 2017 10:05 - 49 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...
Marcia Yonemoto, “The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan” (U of California Press, 2016)
April 25, 2017 11:58 - 1 hourWere women a problem in early modern Japan? If they were, what was the nature of the problem they posed? For whom, and why? Marcia Yonemoto‘s new book explores these questions in a compelling study that brings together the public discourse on women in the Tokugawa period (including prescriptive literature,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alec Ryrie, “Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World” (Viking, 2017)
April 07, 2017 11:00 - 1 hour500 years ago, a German monk and professor named Martin Luther started a well-intentioned movement to reform “the Church” (Jesus founded only one, after all). Luther’s object was not to split the Church, but to bring it into conformity with what he thought was the “true Christianity,” the one he discovered (and, he claimed, any believer could discover) in the Scriptures. Things didn’t work out the way he wanted it to, for the Church did split. And split, and split, and split. There are a lot ...
Holly Hurlburt, “Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance” (Yale UP, 2015)
March 30, 2017 10:00 - 46 minutesCaterina Corner lived a life that was composed of a mixture of adventure, power, and tragedy. The daughter of a Venetian patrician and merchant, she was married to the king of Cyprus while barely a teenager. Within two years of voyaging to her new home in 1472, she became a mother, a widow, and the ruler of Cyprus, over which she reigned until she was dethroned by her Venetian benefactors in 1489. In Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance (Yale Unive...
Raz Chen-Morris, “Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility” (Penn State UP, 2016)
March 29, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourRaz Chen-Morris‘s new book traces a significant and surprising notion through the work of Johannes Kepler: in order to account for real physical motions, one has to investigate artificially produced shadows and reflections. Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) beautifully places Kepler’s optics into conversation with the art and literature of the period. It looks carefully at the crucial ways that changing notions of visibility set...
Meredith K. Ray, “Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in 17th-Century Italy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
March 13, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourMeredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), that collectively offer a fascinating window into the correspondence of two brilliant early modern writers and intellectuals. Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) traces the relationship between Sarrocchi, a Naples-born wri...
Jeroen Dewulf, “The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves” (U. Press of Mississippi, 2016)
February 27, 2017 11:00 - 1 hourThe Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) presents the history of the nation’s forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey and also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America’s most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. The author rejects the usual interpretati...
Matthew James Crawford, “The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
February 23, 2017 20:23 - 1 hourMatthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks closely at the struggles of the Spanish Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century to control the cinchona tree and its bark, and traces the history of quina as a p...
Matthew L. Jones, “Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)
January 23, 2017 22:51 - 1 hourMatthew L. Jones’s wonderful new book traces a history of failed efforts to make calculating machines, from Blaise Pascal’s work in the 1640s through the efforts of Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century, incorporating an account of both the work and relationships of scholars and artisans, and their reflections on the nature of invention. Innovative in its approach and its form, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (Uni...
Surekha Davies, “Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
January 12, 2017 23:24 - 58 minutesYou find a lot of strange things on late medieval and “Age of Discovery” era maps. Of course there are weird beasts of every sort: dragons, griffins, sea monsters, and sundry multi-headed predators. But you also find a lot of bizarre, well, people. These include giant people, tiny people, one-footed people, people with two heads, and people with no heads at all (their eyes, mouths and noses are in their chests). What is one to make of all these different kinds of humanity? And, more important...
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:...
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...
Larrie Ferreiro, “Brothers at Arms: Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It” (Knopf, 2016)
December 02, 2016 21:31 - 1 hourWas the War for American Independence really about American independence? It depends on who you ask. In his new book, Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It (Knopf, 2016), Larrie Ferreiro draws on decades of new research in archives and on battlefields across the US and Europe to detail the smuggling, espionage, gun running, and politicking that wrested the United States from British control. A revision of the national myth that the American colon...
Lena Salaymeh, “Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
December 02, 2016 21:09 - 22 minutesIn her brilliant new book Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Lena Salaymeh, Associate Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University, presents a fascinating account of the historical unfolding of Islamic Law that combines dazzling textual analysis with cutting-edge theoretical interventions. Beginnings of Islamic Law makes a formidable and eminently convincing case for a carefully historicized approach to the study of Islamic law w...
Scott Bruce, ed., “The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters” (Penguin, 2016)
November 28, 2016 21:12 - 38 minutesLike so many Americans, I’m a big fan of the undead. I look forward to a night of nail-biting when a new episode of The Walking Dead airs and I get excited when Hollywood gears up for the next big-budget film featuring zombie hordes. I also love those rarer literary takes on the undead, such as Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and I even published my own riff on the genre entitled The Cliffs, which imagines what those familiar zombies might do in the Appalachian foothills where I live. If you sha...
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...
James Alexander Dun, “Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America” (U. Penn Press, 2016)
November 23, 2016 21:43 - 59 minutesJames Alexander Dun is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. His book Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) provides a detailed examination of how the Haitian Revolution shaped Americans view of their own revolution, their relations with both England and France, and left an imprint on the domestic ideological battles between Federalists and Republicans. Philadelphia, a center for antislavery activity a...
Kelly Watson, “Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World” (NYU Press, 2015)
October 11, 2016 22:01 - 1 hourKelly Watson’s Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World (New York University Press, 2015) explores the history of the New World through the lens of the cannibal myth. Watson establishes that accusations of cannibalism in the Americas during the early modern period became a valuable discursive tool to justify the European imperial project. She shows how early accounts of crazed cannibal women grounded the often discordant voices of Spanish explorers,...
Christopher Woolgar, “The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500” (Yale UP, 2016)
September 30, 2016 18:40 - 57 minutesFood was central to the lives of people in England during the Middle Ages in ways different than it is today. As Christopher Woolgar reveals in his book The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 (Yale University Press, 2016), it had a cultural significance that permeated nearly aspect of their society. Using a vast range of legal, archaeological, and literary sources, he explains what the English ate during the late Middle Ages, how they ate it, and what their food meant to them. The choices ...
Richard Bourke, “Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke” (Princeton UP, 2015)
September 30, 2016 18:31 - 47 minutesRichard Bourke, Professor in the History of Political Thought in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, began developing his history of Edmund Burke’s political thought in 1991. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton University Press, 2015) uses Burke as a window into the eighteenth-century articulations of British imperial power, exploring the way that Burke approached relations between Britain, Ireland, America, India, and France. Beginning w...
Terri Diane Halperin, “The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)
September 26, 2016 18:19 - 58 minutesIn The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Terri Diane Halperin has provided a political history of the 1790s and explained the origins of one of the most contentious free speech events in American history. The Alien and Seditions Acts, which were actually four laws enacted in 1798, dramatically tested the principles of free speech in the young republic. Halperin explains the political origins of the controversy, which began in the...
Liam Brockey, “The Visitor: Andre Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia” (Harvard UP, 2014)
September 11, 2016 21:37 - 1 hourThe transmission of a religion closely connected to a particular culture into a very different religious and cultural environment is a difficult act of translation in which a balance must be struck between remaining true to doctrine while understanding and accommodating cultural difference. Members of the Society of Jesus were engaged in a series of such projects in Asia in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This already difficult task was made more complex by the need to maintain ...