New Books in Early Modern History
1,098 episodes - English - Latest episode: 23 days 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
Timothy McCall, "Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
December 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourLooking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood. Timothy McCall's book Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy (Reaktion, 2023) explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresse...
Thomas Kelly, "The Inscription of Things: Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2023)
December 23, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhy would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse composit...
Philip Snow, "China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord" (Yale UP, 2023)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesRussia and China, the largest and most populous countries in the world, respectively, have maintained a delicate relationship for four centuries. In addition to a four-thousand-kilometer border, they have periodically shared a common outlook on political and economic affairs. But they are, in essence, profoundly different polities and cultures, and their intermittent alliances have proven difficult and at times even volatile. In China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale U...
David M. Freidenreich, "Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy" (U California Press, 2023)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesUncovering the hidden history of Islamophobia and its surprising connections to the long-standing hatred of Jews. Hatred of Jews and hatred of Muslims have been intertwined in Christian thought since the rise of Islam. In Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy (U California Press, 2023), David M. Freidenreich explores the history of this complex, perplexing, and emotionally fraught phenomenon. He makes the compelling case that, then and now, hate-mongers target "them" in a...
Brian Jeffrey Maxson, "Early Modern Europe: Facts and Fictions" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesToday I talked to Brian Maxson about his new book Early Modern Europe: Facts and Fictions (Bloomsbury, 2023). Through the exploration of nine common myths about the history and culture of early modern Europe, roughly 1350-1700, this book uses common assumptions to introduce newcomers to the period and its key figures, developments, and events. Many myths about early modern Europe originated in the 19th and 20th centuries and continue to appear today across popular media. In recent years, suc...
Katlyn Marie Carter, "Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions" (Yale UP, 2023)
December 19, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesKatlyn Marie Carter, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale UP, 2023) examines how debates over secrecy and transparency in politics during the eighteenth century shaped modern democracy. Does democracy die in darkness, as the saying suggests? This book reveals that modern democracy was born in secrecy, despite the widespread conviction that transparency was its very essence. In the years preceding the American and French revolutions, state secrecy cam...
Kathy Stuart, "Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
December 13, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourSuicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. In Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin, and Salvation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unin...
Tristan G. Brown, "Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesWelcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and I am speaking today to Prof. Tristan Brown about his book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton UP, 2023). Brown’s book considers fengshui, that is, the knowledge of orienting structures, such as graves and houses, in accordance with well-established cosmological principles, as an administrative technology and language of power that was intrinsic to governance ...
Genealogies of Modernity Episode 6: A Medieval Anti-Racist
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesWhat if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adornol, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the presence of slavery. His intellectual rebellion spurred slavery’s apologists to more strident and sinister modes of de...
Genealogies of Modernity Episode 5: Picturing Race in Colonial Mexico
December 09, 2023 23:24 - 1 hourRace is sometimes treated as a biological fact. It is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be spread – and made visible. Art historian Ilona Katzew tells the story of how Spanish colonists of modern-day Mexico developed theories of blood purity and used the casta paintings – featuring family groups with differing skin pigmentations set in domestic scenes – to represent these theories as reality. She also shares the strange challenges of curating th...
Our Lady of Guadalupe and Aztec True Myth
December 09, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIt turns out that our familiar narrative of the Virgin of Guadalupe, when Mary appeared to Juan Diego in 1531 and left her image on his tilma, resembles an indigenous Mexican myth. And this myth of the Flower World in “Cuicapeuhcayotl” (“Origin of Songs”) has led some secular historians and anthropologists to conclude that the Catholic version must therefore be an imitation, a fabrication. Yet Joseph Julián and Monique González concluded that the opposite was true. They argue “that God had p...
Genealogies of Modernity Episode 4: Jamestown and the Myth of the Sovereign Family
December 08, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutesWhat is the “traditional American family?” Popular images from the colonial and pioneer past suggest an isolated and self-sufficient nuclear family as the center of American identity and the source of American strength. But the idea of early American self-sufficiency is a myth. Caro Pirri tells the story of the precarious Jamestown settlement and how its residents depended on each other and on Indigenous Americans for survival. Early American history can help us imagine new kinds of interdepe...
Hannah Carlson, "Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close" (Algonquin Books, 2023)
December 06, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesIt’s a subject that stirs up plenty of passion: Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets and women’s so few? In her captivating book Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close (Hachette, 2023), Dr. Hannah Carlson, a lecturer in dress history at the Rhode Island School of Design, shows us how we tuck gender politics, security, sexuality, and privilege inside our pockets. In mediaeval Europe, the purse was an almost universal dress feature carried by men and women alike. But when...
Lawrence Zhang, "Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China" (Harvard UP, 2023)
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesThe Qing dynasty's office purchase system (juanna) allowed men to legally and openly pay for appointments in the civil service — enabling them to skip the much-lauded civil service examination entirely. Thoroughly forgotten by historians and often dismissed as "corruption," Lawrence Zhang's meticulous book, Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), unpacks this system. Through a thorough analysis of archival and other print ...
Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation
December 02, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesThe “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. Their deeds still resonate today. Indeed, these nomads built long-lasting empires, facilitated the first global trade of the Silk Road and disseminated religions, technology, knowledge and goods of every description th...
Jeff Jarvis, "The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
December 01, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind in The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the...
D. L. d'Avray, "The Power of Protocol: Diplomatics and the Dynamics of Papal Government, c. 400-c.1600" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
November 30, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Power of Protocol: Diplomatics and the Dynamics of Papal Government, c. 400 – c.1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. David d’Avray asks: How did the papacy govern European religious life without a proper bureaucracy and the normal resources of a state? From late Antiquity, papal responses were in demand. The 'apostolic see' took over from Roman emperors the discourse and demeanour of a religious ruler of the Latin world. Over the centuries, it acquired governmental authority ana...
Richard Schoch, "Shakespeare’s House: A Window onto his Life and Legacy" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
November 29, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesIn the wide realm of Shakespeare worship, the house in Stratford-upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 – known colloquially as the 'Birthplace' – remains the chief shrine. It's not as romantic as Anne Hathaway's thatched cottage, it's not where he wrote any of his plays, and there's nothing inside the house that once belonged to Shakespeare himself. So why, for centuries, have people kept turning up on the doorstep? In Shakespeare’s House: A Window onto his Life and Legacy (Blo...
Rebecca Simon, "The Pirates’ Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
November 28, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesIn The Pirate's Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship (Reaktion, 2023), Dr. Rebecca Simon presents a rollicking account of pirates’ codes, the strict rules essential for survival at sea. Pirates have long captured the imagination with images of cutlass-wielding swashbucklers, eye patches and buried treasure. But what was life really like on a pirate ship? Piracy was a risky, sometimes deadly occupation, and strict orders were essential for everyone’s survival. These ‘Laws’ were sets of rules that d...
Henrietta Harrison, "The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire" (Princeton UP, 2021)
November 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire (Princeton UP, 2021) is a fascinating history of China's relations with the West--told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translators. The 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney's fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East's lack of interest in the West. In The Perils of Interpreti...
Roslyn Weiss, "Hasdai Crescas: Collected Writings" (Library of the Jewish People, 2023)
November 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Roslyn Weiss, editor of Hasdai Crescas: Collected Writings (Library of the Jewish People, 2023). Hasdai Crescas spent his life in public service - as a rabbi and community leader in desperate times in 14th-century Spain. Despite having limited time for writing, he produced several important works, which Collected Writings presents in their entirety. The first of these, Epistle to the Jews of Avignon, he wrote in the immediate aftermath of the anti-Jewish riots in Aragon in 1...
Tabitha Stanmore, "Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 24, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesMagic is ubiquitous across the world and throughout history. Yet if witchcraft is acknowledged as a persistent presence in the medieval and early modern eras, practical magic by contrast – performed to a useful end for payment, and actually more common than malign spellcasting – has been overlooked. In Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Tabitha Stanmore brings this world to light. E...
Ian Smith, "Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Ian Smith urges readers of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet to develop “racial literacy.” Through both wide social influences and specific professional pressures, Shakespearean critics have been taught to ignore, suppress, and explain away the racial thinking of the plays, a set of evasion strategies that inevitably have political and social ramifications in the contemporary United States. As Ian ...
Amy Harris, "Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried" (Oxford UP, 2023)
November 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourBeing Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Harris is the first book-length exploration of what family life looked like, and how it was experienced, when viewed from the perspective of unmarried and childless family members. Using a microhistorical approach, Dr. Harris covers three generations of the famous musical and abolitionist Sharp family. The abundance of records the Sharps produced and preserved reveals how singl...
Joe Lane, "Networks, Innovation, and Knowledge: the North Staffordshire Potteries, 1750-1851" (U of London, 2023)
November 20, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesDuring the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the industrial district of the North Staffordshire Potteries dominated the British earthenware industry, producing local goods that sold in global markets. Over this time the region experienced consistent growth in output, an extreme spatial concentration of physical and human capital, and became home to some of the most famous Master Potters in the world. The Potteries was also characterised by a growing body of useful and practical knowledge a...
Joeri Teeuwisse, "Fake History: 101 Things That Never Happened" (Ebury Press, 2022)
November 18, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesFake news about the past is fake history. Did Hugo Boss design the Nazi uniforms? Did medieval people think the world was flat? Did Napoleon shoot the nose off the Sphinx? *Spoiler Alert* The answer to all those questions is no. From the famous quote 'Let them eat cake' - mistakenly attributed to Marie Antoinette - to the apocryphal horns that adorned Viking helmets, fake history continues to shape the story we tell about who we are and how we got here. With doctored photographs, AI-gener...
Kai Jun Chen, "Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China" (U Washington Press, 2023)
November 13, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourPorcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technology in Qing China (University of Washington Press; 2023) looks at the history of court-sponsored porcelain production in Qing China through the work and career of the Manchu polymath Tang Ying (1682-1756). Viewing him as a technocrat — an official who combined technological specialization and managerial expertise — Kai Jun Chen uses Tang to explore how porcelain manufacture was carried out in the Qing, how technological innovations were create...
Writing the History of Money and Monetary Policy
November 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhat do the histories of currency and monetary policy tell us about societies at large, political structures, and cultures? Ekaterina Pravilova and Rebecca Spang tackle these questions, respectively, in two important books that examine the history of the Russian ruble from the time of Catherine the Great through the Soviet period, and the history of money during the time of time of the French Revolution. Their conversation delves not only into the past, but into the economic theories and assu...
Empires, States, Corporations: A Discussion with Historians Philip J. Stern and Quinn Slobodian
November 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAdam Smith wrote that, “Political economy belongs to no nation; it is of no country: it is the science of the rules for the production, the accumulation, the distribution, and the consumption of wealth.” However Adam Smith regarded the science of political economy, in practical terms, one is quite hard pressed to find a case where governments—be it an empire, republic, or nation—were completely left out of the picture. At least, that is how it’s been historically. Questions about how people a...
Marion Gibson, "Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials" (Scribner, 2023)
October 31, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesWitchfinder General, Salem, Malleus Maleficarum. The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we often hear ‘witch-hunt’ in today’s media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar. Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018. In Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen signific...
Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson, "Dublin: Mapping the City" (Birlinn, 2023)
October 31, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMaps are essential tools in finding our way around, but they also tell stories and are great depositories of information. Until the twentieth century and the arrival of aerial images, a map was the best way of getting a sense of what a city looked like on the ground. Dublin: Mapping the City (Birlinn, 2023) by Dr. Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson presents a carefully chosen selection of maps that traces the growth and development of Dublin from the early seventeenth century to the present day, ...
Leonie Hannan, "A Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth-Century Home" (Manchester UP, 2023)
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesLeonie Hannan's book Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth Century Home (Manchester University Press, 2023) explores the practice of scientific enquiry as it took place in the eighteenth-century home. While histories of science have identified the genteel household as an important site for scientific experiment, they have tended to do so via biographies of important men of science. Using a wide range of historical source material, from household accounts and inventories to letters a...
James White, "Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Migrant Poets between Arabia, Iran and India" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea during the seventeenth century, as merchants from South Asia traded goods in the ports of Yemen, noblemen from Safavid Iran established themselves in the courts of the Mughal Empire, and scholars from across the region came together to debate the Islamic sciences in the Arabian Peninsula's holy cities of Mecca and Medina. James White's book Persian and Arabic Literary Comm...
Chet Van Duzer, "Frames That Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps" (Brill, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesFrames That Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps (Brill, 2023) is the first systematic exploration of cartographic cartouches, the decorated frames that surround the title, or other text or imagery, on historic maps. It addresses the history of their development, the sources cartographers used in creating them, and the political, economic, historical, and philosophical messages their symbols convey. Cartouches are the most visually appealing parts of maps, and also spaces where the cartogra...
James V. Fenelon, "Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790" (Routledge, 2023)
October 28, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn this interview James Fenelon discusses his new book entitled Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, recently published with Routledge (2023). The book traces 500 years of European-American colonization and racialized dominance, expanding our common assumptions about the ways racialization was used to build capitalism and the modern world-system. Professor Fenelon draws on personal experience and the agency of understudied Native (and Af...
Mariana-Cecilia Velazquez, "Cultural Representations of Piracy in England, Spain, and the Caribbean" (Routledge, 2023)
October 23, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesMariana-Cecilia Velazquez's book Cultural Representations of Piracy in England, Spain, and the Caribbean: Travelers, Traders, and Traitors, 1570 to 1604 (Routledge, 2023) examines the concept of piracy as an instrument for the advancement of legal, economic, and political agendas associated with early modern imperial conflicts in the Caribbean. Drawing on historical accounts, literary texts, legal treatises, and maps, the book traces the visual and narrative representations of Sir Francis Dra...
David C. Atherton, "Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature" (Columbia UP, 2023)
October 23, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesEdo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the realms of history and the fantastic, and breathed new life into literary tradition. But how to understand the politics of this body of literature remains contested, in part because the defining characteristics of much early modern fiction—formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic and intertextual play, and heavy allusion to ...
Rosie Harte, "The Royal Wardrobe: Peek into the Wardrobes of History's Most Fashionable Royals" (Headline, 2023)
October 22, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesFashion for the royal family has long been one of their most powerful weapons. Every item of their clothing is imbued with meaning, history and majesty, telling a complex tale of the individuals who wore them and the houses they represented. The Royal Wardrobe: Peek Into the Wardrobes of History's Most Fashionable Royals (Headline, 2023) by Rosie Harte introduces readers to this world. From the draping of a fabric to the arrangements of jewels, the clothing worn by royals is anything but coin...
Grant H. Kester, "The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde" (Duke UP, 2023)
October 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke UP, 2023), Grant Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society—through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx...
Shannon McHugh, "Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesShannon McHugh's book Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy (Amsterdam University Press, 2023) is a new history of early modern gender, told through the lyric poetry of Renaissance Italy. In the evolution of Western gender roles, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when a confluence of cultural developments disrupted centuries of Aristotelian, binary thinking. Men and women living through this upheaval exploited Petrarchism's capacity for subjective expression an...
Elena Serrano, "Ladies of Honor and Merit. Gender, Useful Knowledge, and Politics in Enlightened Spain" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesIn this episode I interview Elena Serrano, a research member of the Project Cirgen at the Universitat de València and Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Institut d'Història de la Ciència (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona). She trained in the former Centre for the History of Science in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and in the History of Science and Philosophy Department in Cambridge University before taking postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science i...
Jeremy Land, "Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700-1776)" (Brill, 2023)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesJeremy Land's book Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700-1776) (Brill, 2023) takes a long-run view of the global maritime trade of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia from 1700 to American Independence in 1776. Land argues that the three cities developed large, global networks of maritime commerce and exchange that created tension between merchants and the British Empire which sought to enforce mercantilist policies to constrain American trade to within t...
Paul Clammer, "Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom" (Hurst, 2023)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesHow did a Caribbean child, born into plantation slavery, come to defeat Napoleon's armies in battle and crown himself king of the first free black nation in the Americas? Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom (Hurst, 2023) is the story of Henry Christophe: one of the most remarkable, yet least known, figures from the Age of Revolution. Christophe fought as a child soldier in the American War of Independence, before rising to prominence dur...
Colin Dickey, "Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy" (Viking, 2023)
October 17, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesThe United States was born in paranoia. From the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organized by the French) to the Salem witch trials to the Satanic Panic, the Illuminati, and QAnon, one of the most enduring narratives that defines the United States is simply this: secret groups are conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law. We’d like to assume these panics exist only at the fringes of society, or are unique features of the internet age. But histor...
Onyeka Nubia, "England’s Other Countrymen: Black Tudor Society" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
October 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Tudor period remains a source of timeless fascination, with endless novels, TV programmes and films depicting the period in myriad ways. And yet our image of the Tudor era remains overwhelmingly white. This ground-breaking and provocative new book seeks to redress the balance: revealing not only how black presence in Tudor England was far greater than has previously been recognised, but that Tudor conceptions of race were far more complex than we have been led to believe. Onyeka Nubia's o...
A. Katie Harris, "The Stolen Bones of St. John of Matha: Forgery, Theft, and Sainthood in the Seventeenth Century" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023)
October 16, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesOn the night of March 18, 1655, two Spanish friars broke into a church to steal the bones of the founder of their religious institution, the Order of the Most Holy Trinity. This book investigates this little-known incident of relic theft and the lengthy legal case that followed, together with the larger questions that surround the remains of saints in seventeenth-century Catholic Europe. Drawing on a wealth of manuscript and print sources from the era, A. Katie Harris uses the case of St. Joh...
Branko Milanovic, "Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War" (Harvard UP, 2023)
October 16, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutes"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot ...
John D. Garrigus, "A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2023)
October 15, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesA bold rethinking of the Haitian Revolution reveals the roots of the only successful slave uprising in the modern world. Unearthing the progenitors of the Haitian Revolution has been a historical project of two hundred years. In A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution (Harvard UP, 2023), John D. Garrigus introduces two dozen Black men and women and their communities whose decades of resistance to deadly environmental and political threats preceded and shaped ...
Peter Stark, "Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation" (Random House, 2023)
October 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe conquest of Indigenous land in the eastern United States through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the American West. In Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation (Random House, 2023), acclaimed author Peter Stark exposes the fundamental conflicts at play through the little-known but consequential struggle between two extraordinary leaders. William Henry Harrison was born to a prominent V...
Andrea Celli, "Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy: From Muslim Spain to Post-Colonial Italy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
October 11, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesIn Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy: From Muslim Spain to Post-Colonial Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Andrea Celli explores the complex ways in which Dante’s Comedy could be considered ‘Mediterranean,’ ranging widely from Orientalist scholarship to prison wall graffiti in Palermo. He presents both a history of criticism that explores the 20th-century debates around Dante and Islam as well as a novel approach to interrogating Mediterranean possibilities in the reception and appropriation...