New Books in Early Modern History
1,098 episodes - English - Latest episode: 19 days ago - ★★★★★ - 4 ratingsInterviews with scholars of the Early Modern World about the new books
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Episodes
Richard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
May 14, 2014 10:42 - 1 hourDuring the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the buildings and streets of his city were licked and then consumed by flames. We know this thanks to a diary in which he recorded these burnings and burials. In his new book, Richard Yeo contextualizes the diary-keeping and document-organizing practices of men like Pepys within a rich, detailed account...
John Cornwell, “The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession” (Basic Books, 2014)
April 08, 2014 15:26 - 58 minutesI’ve never been in a confessional box, but I’ve seen a lot of them in films. And if the depiction of them in films is in any way a reflection of popular attitudes toward confession, then I can say with some confidence that the act has a rather poor reputation. Confessional boxes are–in my imagination, at least–dark places where dark things are admitted and, sometimes, even darker things are done. Is it a surprise that fewer and fewer Catholics confess their sins in the box? John Cornwell does...
Matthew C. Hunter, “Wicked Intelligence” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
March 23, 2014 12:31 - 1 hourThe pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experimental community of Restoration London. Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (University of Chicago Press, 2013) maps the visual traces of drawing, collecting, and building practices between 1650 and 1720 to narrate the emergence of a particular kind of int...
Josef Stern, “The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide” (Harvard UP, 2013)
March 14, 2014 06:00 - 1 hourThe medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides’ most famous work, The Guide of the Perplexed, has been interpreted variously as an attempt to reconcile reason and religion, as a guide to philosophers on ruling the community while concealing the truth, or as an exegesis of rabbinical texts. In The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide (Harvard University Press, 2013), Josef Stern provides an entirely distinct reading of this singular work. Stern, William H. Colvin Professor in the Department of P...
Kathleen Wellman, “Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France” (Yale UP, 2013)
January 21, 2014 13:36 - 1 hourQueens and royal mistresses of the Renaissance were the Hollywood celebrities of their time, which explains their enduring magnetism for writers, artists, and the public. Historians and scholars, however, have long ignored them. Enlightenment philosophers used descriptions of powerful women in the French court to mock the monarchy. Nineteenth-century historians propagated myths about these historical women to discredit the monarchy and to justify the exclusion of women from the French republi...
Rumee Ahmed, “Narratives of Islamic Legal Theory” (Oxford UP, 2012)
December 20, 2013 15:25 - 1 hourHow should one understand Islamic law outside of its application? What happens when we think about religious jurisprudence theoretically? For medieval Muslim scholars this was the field where one could enumerate the meaning and purpose of Islamic law. But to the uninitiated these justifications for legal thinking are submerged in rote repetition of technical language and discourses. Luckily for us, Rumee Ahmed, professor in the Department of Classics, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the...
Sanja Perovic, "The Calendar in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2012)
October 03, 2013 08:00 - 1 hourBrumaire. Germinal. Thermidor. There is nothing more evocative of the French Revolutionary imaginary than the names of the months of the republican calendar that became official in 1793 (the calendar was back-dated to 1792, or Year I). In The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Sanja Perovic explores the history and meanings of the republican calendar as a representation of the complexities of revolutionari...
Annette Kolodny, “In Search of First Contact” (Duke University Press, 2012)
October 01, 2013 17:41 - 41 minutesWe all know the song. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” And now, thankfully, we all know the controversy; celebrating a perpetrator of genocide might say a few unpleasant things about the country doing the celebrating. But there is something that most Americans don’t know: Europeans had visited the continent at least half a millennium before Columbus. Remembered in two medieval tales known as the “Vinland sagas,” and in 1960 corroborated by a major archaeological discovery, Indigenou...
Kees Boterbloem, “Moderniser of Russia: Andrei Vinius, 1641-1716” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
September 07, 2013 18:19 - 1 hourAs you can read in any Russian history textbook, a series of seventeenth-century tsars culminating in Peter the Great attempted to “modernize” Russia. This is not false: the Romanovs did initiate a great wave of “Europeanizing” reforms. But it’s not exactly true either in the sense that they–the tsars themselves–didn’t generally do the work of Europeanizing reform because they knew next to nothing about Europe (Peter being something of an exception). In order to import and assimilate European...
Jonathan Hay, “Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China” (University of Hawaii Press, 2010)
August 19, 2013 16:45 - 1 hourSensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010) is a study of domestically produced, portable decorative arts in early modern China. Decorative objects connect us, visually and physically, to the world around us. In many ways they think with us, and an experience of pleasure... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew W. Mosca, “From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China” (Stanford, 2013)
July 22, 2013 14:28 - 1 hourMatthew Mosca‘s impressively researched and carefully structured new book maps the transformation of geopolitical worldviews in a crucial period of Qing and global history. From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford University Press, 2013) traces a shift in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alisha Rankin, “Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany” (U. Chicago Press, 2013)
July 18, 2013 13:34 - 1 hourDorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the Elector of Saxony who favored testing medical remedies on others before using them on her friends and family. Elisabeth was an invalid patient whose preferred treatments included topical remedies and ministrations from the “almighty physician,” but never “the smear.” We meet these three lively women in the pages of Alisha Rankin‘s wonder...
Brian Sandberg, “Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
July 15, 2013 13:40 - 57 minutesBrian Sandberg‘s Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) significantly revises our understanding of early modern military culture and absolutism. By examining the frequent civil wars of the early seventeenth century in France, Sandberg demonstrates that the French nobility were neither merely resisting the spread of the absolutist state nor sitting idly by while modern economic and military forces swept them into obscuri...
Logan Beirne, “Blood of Tyrants: George Washington & the Forging of the Presidency” (Encounter Books, 2013)
June 14, 2013 16:02 - 1 hourYou sometimes see bumper stickers that say “What would Jesus do?” It’s a good question, at least for Christians. You don’t see bumper stickers that say “What would Washington do?” But that, Logan Beirne says, is a question Americans should be asking. In Blood of Tyrants: George Washington & the Forging of the Presidency (Encounter Books, 2013), Beirne shows that the American presidency was born as much out of the personality of one man–George Washington–as it was out of the political philosop...
Martin A. Miller, “The Foundations of Modern Terrorism” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
May 31, 2013 17:43 - 1 hourTerrorism seems like the kind of thing that has existed since the beginning of states some 5,000 years ago. Understood in one, narrow way–as what we call “insurgency”–it probably has. But modern terrorism is, well, modern as Martin A. Miller explains in The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society, and the Dynamics of Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Miller traces our kind of terrorism to the French Revolution or thereabouts, and specifically to the formation of t...
Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
April 01, 2013 17:09 - 1 hourNicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) takes readers into the texture of Walter Ralegh’s masterwork and the textual and epistemic practices through which he used the past to understand and offer counsel on the events of the present. Ralegh passed seven o...
Sean Cocco, “Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
March 28, 2013 13:07 - 1 hourThe story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco‘s rich new book uses Vesuvius as a focal point for exploring the histories of natural history, travel, observation, imaging, astronomy, and many other aspects of the places and identities of early modern history. Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) pays special attention to t...
Lawrence M. Principe, “The Secrets of Alchemy” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
March 18, 2013 18:16 - 1 hourWhat is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish? Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book explores these questions and some possible answers to them in a wonderfully written and argued introduction to the history of western alchemy. The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the genealogy of alchemical practices from their early Greco-Egyptian foundations through early modern chymistry, pausing along the way to refle...
Joy Wiltenburg, “Crime & Culture in Early Modern Germany” (University of Virginia Press, 2012)
March 11, 2013 15:33 - 48 minutesMany people complain about sensationalism in the press. If a man slaughters his entire family, a jilted lover kills her erstwhile boyfriend, or a high school student murders several of his classmates, it’s going to be “all over the news.” But it’s hard to blame the press, exclusively at least. Joy Wiltenburg‘s Crime & Culture in Early Modern Germany (University of Virginia Press, 2012) suggests (to me at least), that those who criticize the press for sensationalism have cause and effect rever...
E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
February 18, 2013 13:26 - 1 hourBy focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eatin...
Janice Neri, “The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
December 13, 2012 22:11 - 1 hourBefore the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, insects crawled their way to the center of books, paintings, and other media of natural history illustration. Janice Neri‘s wonderful book charts this transformation in the practices of depicting insects through the early modern period. Inspired by the archaeology of Foucault but using an approach that spans the history of scien...
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia” (Harvard University Press, 2012)
December 05, 2012 13:38 - 1 hourSanjay Subrahmanyam‘s new book explores translations across texts, images, and cultural practices in the early modern world. Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2012) uses three key themes in early modern history – diplomacy, warfare, and visual representation – to show how commensurability across cultures, rather than existing prior to an encounter, had to be actively made by its agents. Subrahmanyam brings us into the m...
Russell Martin, “A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage in Early Modern Russia” (NIU Press, 2012)
November 29, 2012 20:17 - 1 hourYou probably know the story about the king who issues a call for the most beautiful girls in the land to be presented to him as potential brides in a kind of “bride-show.” And you might think this is just a myth. But actually it’s not. As Russell Martin shows... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniela Bleichmar, “Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
November 26, 2012 17:24 - 1 hourDaniela Bleichmar‘s new book is a story about 12,000 images. In Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Bleichmar uses this vast (and gorgeous) archive of botanical images assembled by Spanish natural history expeditions to explore the connections between natural history, visual culture, and empire in the eighteenth century Hispanic world. In beautifully argued chapters, Bleichmar explores that ways that eight...
Anthony Bale, “The Book of Marvels and Travels” (Oxford UP, 2012)
November 02, 2012 18:42 - 1 hourAnthony Bale‘s new translation of Sir John Mandeville’s classic account is an exciting and engaging text that’s accessible to a wide range of readers. The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford University Press, 2012) recounts a fourteenth-century journey across the medieval world, albeit one that was likely written as the result of a voyage through libraries and bookshops. Mandeville (whomever he was – and we talk about this issue in the course of our conversation) offers extended discussions o...
Pamela O. Long, “Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600” (Oregon State University Press, 2011)
October 26, 2012 19:18 - 1 hourPamela O. Long‘s clear, accessible, and elegantly written recent book explores the ways that artisan/practitioners influenced the development of the new sciences in the years between 1400 and 1600. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011) introduces the notion of a “trading zone,” building on the articulation of the concept in anthropology and in the work of Peter Galison, to explain the gradual breaking-down of the distinction be...
Amy Stanley, “Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2012)
September 19, 2012 18:46 - 1 hourWith prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley‘s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan through the prism of prostitution. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2012 ) undermines our assumptions... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Robert Westman, “The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order” (University of California Press, 2011)
August 29, 2012 18:49 - 1 hourThis is an extraordinary book written by one of the finest historians of science. Ringing in at nearly seven hundred oversized, double columned pages Robert Westman‘s The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and the Celestial Order (University of California Press, 2011) exhaustively examines the science of the stars in order to understand the problems that drove Copernicus and later engagements with Copernicanism. Far more than a reception study, Westman uncovers the practices, o...
Avner Ben Zaken, “Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
August 11, 2012 22:04 - 1 hourIn Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), Avner Ben Zaken introduces readers to a wonderfully diverse cast of characters and texts to show how fundamental notions of modern science (and modernity in general) were established in cross-cultural exchanges across the globe. Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges i...
Paul Friedland, “Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment In France” (Oxford University Press, 2012)
July 16, 2012 14:56 - 58 minutesIt seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in carrying out the thousands of executions that made the Terror what it was. Depictions of the revolutionary period often put the guillotine at center stage: atop a p...
Elizabeth Goldsmith, “The King’s Mistresses” (PublicAffairs, 2012)
June 29, 2012 18:07 - 43 minutesAs Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (PublicAffairs, 2012), the Mazarin sisters were “arguably the first media celebrities.” Upon their arrival at Louis XIV’s Court of Versailles, the sisters made a splash when Marie and the young King promptly fell in love. Ultimately, the couple’s relationship– which climaxed with a forced separation and Marie’s confinement in a convent– reads...
Sally Bedell Smith, “Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch” (Random House, 2012)
June 01, 2012 15:29 - 42 minutesThe second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media attention focused upon her family. In her new book, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Random House, 2012), Sally Bedell Smith peels back the layers of mystique to reveal the very shy woman who is the current Queen. It isn’t so much a dismantling as a reevaluation, an effort to appreciate a figure who– though part of an institution ...
Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean, “Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713” (Oxford UP, 2011)
March 14, 2012 14:45 - 1 hourNineteenth-century observers would say that the British Empire was an Islamic one; be that as it may, before Empire there was trade- and lots of it. Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean‘s book, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), though, goes beyond trade- there was also lots of curiosity, in Britain and abroad, about the strange new peoples and products beginning to move more freely across the world than ever before. It is this aspect of British-Muslim...
Ann M. Blair, “Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age” (Yale University Press, 2010)
March 07, 2012 18:15 - 1 hourChewing on raw turnips and sand, keeping both feet in a tub of cold water, reading with just one eye open (to give the other a chance to rest) and sleeping only every other night: no, I am not describing the typical life of a pre-tenure professor trying to get her book finished. Instead, these are just some of the sacrifices that compilers made in order to produce some of the most massive reference works in early modernity. In a work of extraordinary depth that ranges from antiquity through t...
Timothy Brook, “The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties” (Harvard UP, 2010)
February 24, 2012 22:12 - 1 hourTim Brook‘s The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010) rewards the reader on many levels. Though it provides an excellent introduction to Yuan and Ming history for both students and advanced scholars, it’s not merely a dry textbook: The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carol Benedict, “Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010” (University of California Press, 2011)
February 16, 2012 14:25 - 1 hourCarol Benedict‘s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011)is many things at the same time; among other things, it’s both an exceptionally rich account of an object (or set of objects) that were crucial to the history of China in the world, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Philip Stern, “The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India” (Oxford UP, 2011)
November 30, 2011 18:37 - 1 hour‘Traders to rulers’ is an enduring caption insofar as the English East India Company is concerned. But were they ever just traders to start off with, and they eventually morph into mere temporal rulers unconcerned with the dynamics of the global economy? Philip Stern‘s book, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) explores just this: the changing boundaries and demarcations between corpo...
Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, "Mexico's Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500-2010" (U Colorado Press, 2010)
October 17, 2011 08:00 - 1 hourIn my work with pre-Hispanic and colonial Mexican pictorial texts, I often wish I could talk with the people who authored them. In the academic setting, sometimes we forget that these documents represent conversations about what was happening in the lives of many people at the time they were created and that some aspects of these materials that we have found in archives or ancient cities are still part of the cultural heritage and daily lives of the descendants of the creators. Ethelia Ruiz M...
Andrew Curran, “The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)
October 10, 2011 19:28 - 54 minutesWe’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curranexplain the history of “Blackness.” Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe lookdifferent for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains ...
Eric Rath, “Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2010)
August 04, 2011 17:15 - 1 hourCuisine in early modern Japan was experienced and negotiated through literature and ritual, and the uneaten or inedible was often as important as what was actually consumed. Eric Rath‘s recent book Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2010) is a rich study of the culture,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Robert Pasnau, “Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671” (Oxford UP, 2011)
July 15, 2011 15:05 - 1 hourWhat was the scholastic metaphysical tradition of the later Middle Ages, and why did it come “crashing down as quickly and completely” as it did towards the end of the 17th Century? Why was the year 1347 a “milestone in the history of philosophy”? And why didn’t philosophy itself collapse right along with the scholastic framework? In Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder) provides a monumental yet highly readable synthes...
Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
May 31, 2011 18:19 - 59 minutesIn her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schaefer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Virginia Scharff, “The Women Jefferson Loved” (HarperCollins, 2010)
February 11, 2011 19:42 - 1 hourMost Americans could tell you who George Washington’s wife was. (Martha, right?) Most Americans probably couldn’t tell you who Thomas Jefferson’s wife was. (It was also Martha, but a different one of course). They might be able to tell you, however, who Thomas Jefferson’s alleged concubine was, as she has been in the news a lot lately. (His slave, Sally Hemings). But actually there were a lot of women in Jefferson’s life–or should we say a lot of women had Jefferson in their lives. Virginia S...
Ann Fabian, “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead” (University of Chicago, 2010)
December 17, 2010 19:09 - 1 hourWhat should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subject: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man ” (An Essay on Man, 1733). He was not alone in this opinion. The philosophers of the Enlightenment–of which we may count Pope–all believed that humans would benefit most from a proper comprehension of temporal things, and most particularly humanity itself. For them, understanding humanity meant, first and ...
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Russian Orientalism” (Yale UP, 2010)
October 08, 2010 19:06 - 1 hourThere’s a saying, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar.” I’ve scratched a Russian (I won’t say anything more about that) and I can tell you that the saying is false: all I found was more Russian. It’s true, however, that Russians have always known a lot about Tatars because they’ve lived cheek-by-jowl with them for many centuries. Before the beginning of European contact with Russia in the sixteenth century, Russians didn’t really think the Tatars were ter...
Toby Lester, “The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name” (Free Press, 2009)
January 07, 2010 18:40 - 1 hourWhy the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Lester‘s fascinating and terrifically readable new book The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name (Free Press, 2009). As Toby points out, medieval Europeans thought the earth had three parts–Europe, Asia and Africa, with Jerusalem at the dead center and water all around. (And no, they ...
Sarah Ross, “The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England” (Harvard UP, 2009)
December 11, 2009 16:24 - 1 hourI’ll be honest: I have a Ph.D. in early modern European history from a big university you’ve probably heard of and I couldn’t name a single female writer of the Renaissance before I read Sarah Ross’s new book The Birth of Feminism. Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Harvard University Press, 2009). Does that make me a bad person? No, other things make me a bad person. But it does make me and my entire field ignorant, for as Sarah points out there were quite a number of femal...
J. D. Bowers, “Joseph Priestley and English Unitarianism in America” (Penn State University Press, 2007)
March 14, 2008 02:20 - 55 minutesToday we talk to J. D. Bowers of Northern Illinois University about his book Joseph Priestley and English Unitarianism in America (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Against the received wisdom, Bowers argues that American Unitarianism did not emerge solely from indigenous Boston-based Congregationalism. Instead, he shows that Joseph Priestly and English Unitarianism exercised considerable influence on the church throughout the nineteenth century, despite what the Unitarians themselv...