New Books in Geography
498 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★ - 14 ratingsInterviews with Geographers about their New Books
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Episodes
Dalia Muller, “Cuban Emigres and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (UNC Press, 2017)
June 23, 2017 10:00 - 49 minutesCuba and Mexico have a long history of exchange and interaction. Cubans traveled to Mexico to work, engage in politics from afar, or expand businesses. Dalia Antonia Muller‘s Cuban Emigres and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) restores lost histories of those migrations, focusing particularly on political exiles in the nineteenth century who found, in cities like Veracruz, Merida and Mexico City, other people and resources with which ...
Neil M. Maher, “Apollo in the Age of Aquarius” (Harvard UP, 2017)
June 20, 2017 10:00 - 52 minutesIn the summer of 1969, two seminal events of the sixties happened within a few weeks of each other: the first man walked on the moon and the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York. At first glance, these two events might appear to have little to do with one another. But in his new book, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017), Neil Maher examines the often contentious relationship between the NASA-led space program and the social movements of the era. Ma...
Jorge Duany, “Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford UP, 2017)
June 13, 2017 19:14 - 31 minutesNot quite a colony, not quite independent, fiercely nationalist, what is Puerto Rico’s status, exactly? Jorge Duany‘s Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers clear answers to complicated questions about Puerto Rico’s politics and history, as well as accounting for many phenomena that characterize the island today; migration to and from the island, the state of its economy, the role of language in shaping Puerto Rican identities. Whether you know nothing...
“Latino City” Part I: An Interview with Dr. Erualdo Gonzalez
June 01, 2017 19:46 - 34 minutesIn Latino City: Urban Planning, Politics, and the Grassroots (Routledge 2017) Dr. Erualdo R. Gonzalez addresses the salient issue of gentrification and its effect on immigrant and working-class populations in the city of Santa Ana, California. Centering his analysis on one of the nations most “Mexican” cities, Gonzalez tracks redevelopment discourse and practice in the city of Santa Ana over the course of four decades. Engaging the concepts of new urbanism, creative class, and transit-oriente...
Or Rosenboim, “The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950” (Princeton UP, 2017)
May 23, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourThe world order was in crisis at mid-century. Intellectuals in England and the United States perceived the rise of totalitarianism, the Second World War, the invention of the atomic bomb, the start of the Cold War, and the end of imperial rule as threats to stability and, in some cases, to mankind itself. But these intellectuals also theorized alternative political structures, legal frameworks, and communities and, thereby, sought to invent a new world order. Or Rosenboim’s The Emergence of ...
Willliam Rankin, “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)
May 17, 2017 21:01 - 42 minutesPolicymakers and the public clamored for maps throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, maps were a necessity for war, navigation, and countless other activities. Yet by the 1960s and 1970s, interest in maps waned while electronic coordinate systems emerged. But this was not solely a shift in technology, as William Rankin writes in After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016). The shi...
Lisa Messeri, “Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds” (Duke UP, 2016)
May 04, 2017 18:30 - 1 hourWhat kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri‘s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and helps us understand why that matters not just for how we understand outer space, but also for how we understand the Earth and ourselves. Based on 15 months of participant observation in 2009 and 2010 that included interviews, involvement in research projects, conferences, email exchanges, informal chats,...
Territory-A Literary Project about Maps: Discussion with Tommy Mira y Lopez
May 03, 2017 10:00 - 54 minutesAs our name makes clear, the New Books Network focuses on books. And as a host who looks at contemporary literature, I have the pleasure of interviewing authors with new books, ones often published by smaller presses without the huge PR machines of larger presses and ones that consequently are often overlooked by larger media outlets. For me, thats one of the rewards of hosting at the New Books Network: I have the chance to showcase important work that you might otherwise miss, work that adds...
Cemil Aydin, “The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History” (Harvard UP, 2017)
May 01, 2017 18:40 - 1 hourAlmost daily in popular media the Muslim World is pinpointed as a homogeneous entity that stands separate and parallel to the similarly imagined West. But even scratching the surface of the idea of a Muslim World reveals the geographic, social, linguistic, and religious diversity of Muslims throughout the world. So what work is performed through the employment and use of this phrase? And in what context did the idea of the Muslim World emerge? Cemil Aydin, Associate Professor of History at t...
Allison E. Fagan, “From the Edge: Chicana/Chicano Border Literature and the Politics of Print” (Rutgers UP, 2016)
April 24, 2017 10:00 - 42 minutesWhat is a book? The answer, at first glance, may seem apparent: printed material consisting of a certain amount of pages. However, when a printed item goes under the scrutiny of readers, writers, editors, scholars, etc., the discussion gets complicated. The matter is that, when read, discussed, or analyzed, a book is situated in a specific environment that creates additional layers for consideration; furthermore, a printed item itself shapes the environment, revealing and producing further de...
Serhat Unaldi, “Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown Bangkok” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2016)
March 28, 2017 10:00 - 58 minutesIn Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown Bangkok (University of Hawaii Press, 2016), Serhat Unaldi offers a provocative and original interpretation of the relationship between space, architecture and power in one of Southeast Asia’s biggest and most complicated cities. Climbing the towers and exploring the alleyways of Siam-Ratchaprasong, that part of Bangkok famous for its gaudy malls, pretentious hotels and tourist strips, Unaldi finds that the charismatic authorit...
Glen A. Fritz, “The Lost Sea of the Exodus, 2nd Edition” (GeoTech, 2016)
March 09, 2017 20:58 - 35 minutesThe crossing of the Israelites through the Red Sea is one of the most famous scenes in the story of the Exodus out of Egypt. But can it be that for the last couple thousand years, historians, geographers, and scholars have had the wrong sea in mind? Dr. Glen A. Fritz believes the answer is yes, and he’s here to tell us why. Well be discussing his recent book, The Lost Sea of the Exodus: A Modern Geographical Analysis (Fritz, 2016). Glen A. Fritz has been involved in the study of the Exodus g...
Jayde Lin Roberts, “Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese” (U. Washington Press, 2016)
February 17, 2017 21:46 - 1 hourIn recent years, scholarship on Burma, or Myanmar, has undergone a renaissance. Jayde Lin Roberts’ Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese (University of Washington Press, 2016) is a bellwether of exciting new books to come, and a model for how they might be done. Although Roberts completed much of her research for the book back under military dictatorship in the 2000s, she explores and situates the Sino-Burmese in downtown Rangoon, or Yangon, in a manner that antici...
Randy Olson, “Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story” (U. Chicago Press, 2015)
February 04, 2017 22:09 - 1 hourRandy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured professor who resigned from his academic post to earn a degree from the world-renowned University of Southern California film school. As a documentary filmmaker, Olson has sought to fuse critical thinking and Hollywood storytelling. And as the author or co-author of three books, Olson has shown how sc...
Joshua Howe, “Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming” (U. Washington Press, 2016)
January 10, 2017 23:20 - 35 minutesThe year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has had record high temperatures, leading one climate researcher to warn the region is unraveling. Yet for the most part, these climate-related events and dire warnings from climatologists have fallen on deaf ears, especially in the United States, where climate-change denial is firmly entrenched, especia...
Regis Darques, “Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans” (Springer, 2016)
December 11, 2016 11:00 - 38 minutesRegis Darques‘ Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans (Springer, 2016) offers the unique mapping perspectives on the Balkan region. By exploring a range of topics such as borderlands, contacts between the empires, transportation networks, changing geographies of borders, ghost borders, countless border crossing and walls, and lack of geographical data, this book also provides numerous resources for historians, political scientists and other scholars. This book shesd light on ...
A. John Simmons, “Boundaries of Authority” (Oxford UP, 2016)
November 01, 2016 16:41 - 58 minutesPolitical states claim the moral right to rule the persons living within their jurisdiction; they claim the authority to make and enforce laws, establish policies, and allocate benefits and burdens of various kinds. But states also claim rights over their territories. These include rights to establish and protect borders, to control airspace, extract and use natural resources on and beneath their geographical region. Philosophers have long wondered about the basis for states claims to authori...
Charlotte Mathieson, ed. “Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present” (Palgrave, 2016)
October 27, 2016 17:19 - 48 minutesWhat is the relationship between the sea and culture? In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present (Palgrave, 2016) , Charlotte Mathieson, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey, assembles a new collection of essays to explore this question. The book develops the concept of a “sea narrative,” thinking through the connection between this and a variety of forms of cultural production. The essays are eclectic, but unified, reflecting the emerging interest ...
Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, “Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism” (U. of Minnesota Press, 2015)
October 11, 2016 22:07 - 53 minutesHow do new policies move from one city or country to another, and is there something distinct about how those transfers work in our perpetually accelerating and ever-more interconnected world? Join us as Jamie Peck, Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, talks about his and Nik Theodore’s new book, Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)....
Harini Nagendra, “Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future” (Oxford UP, 2016)
September 26, 2016 18:14 - 41 minutesIn Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), Harini Nagendra traces centuries of interaction between ecology and urban change, revealing not only the destructive tendencies of urbanization, but also the remarkable ways in which nature survives in one of India’s largest cities. From the ecology of slum life and propensity for home gardens to the differing conceptions of parks and uses of trees, the book brings together the various ways in w...
Neil Kent, “Crimea: A History” (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2016)
September 02, 2016 19:49 - 1 hourIn 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers, Crimea seems as remote today as it was when colonized by the ancient Greeks. Neil Kent’s (University of Cambridge) Crimea: A History (Hurst & Company, 2016) recounts the history of the Crimea over three millennia. A crossroads between Europe and Asia, ships sailed to a...
William Cavert, “The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
August 29, 2016 18:29 - 53 minutesAir pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016), William Cavert examines how Londoners first grappled with the problem of air pollution created by the burning of coal. With concerns expressed for the dwindling supply of wood in England, Londoners in the 16th and 17th centuries increasingly tur...
D. Asher Ghertner, “Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi” (Oxford UP, 2015)
August 11, 2016 21:32 - 56 minutesD. Asher Ghertner explores why the ways things look are fundamental for Delhi’s transformation into a “world class”city. Based on deep ethnographic engagement in one of the city’s slums that is destined to be demolished, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) weaves the experiences of these slum dwellers together with an analysis of middle class Resident Welfare Associations, legal rulings, influential reports, and idle chatter to argue that mappi...
Ana Foteva, “Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe” (Peter Lang, 2014)
June 19, 2016 13:26 - 1 hourStarting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th through the 21st century to explore the various forms the Balkan region has taken in Europe’s political and cultural imagination. Her analysis of these literary works reveals concepts of belonging, multi-belonging and unbelonging among Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians, Slovenes and even Austrians. Ana Fotev...
Emily T. Yeh, “Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development” (Cornell UP, 2013)
June 15, 2015 14:13 - 1 hourEmily T. Yeh‘s Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press, 2013) is an award-winning critical analysis of the production and transformation of the Tibetan landscape since 1950, construing development as a “state project that is presented as a gift to the Tibetan people” especially as it works to territorialize Tibet. Focusing on Lhasa and its environs, Yeh takes readers through three key transformations that each formed an important st...
Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, eds., “The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology” (Routledge, 2015)
June 10, 2015 14:28 - 51 minutesPolitical ecology is among the most vibrant sub-fields in the discipline of geography. Since the field first developed in the 1980s, political ecologists have pioneered new approaches to studying relations between society and the environment. The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (Routledge, 2015), co-edited by Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, is a compendium of over fifty essays by leading scholars in the field on different aspects of political ecology. In the field’s e...
Benjamin Schmidt, “Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
May 19, 2015 18:13 - 1 hourBenjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad range of media that used both text and image to engage with the non-European world. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) takes readers into the Dutch ateliers in which exotic geography was produced by bookmakers, paying s...
Julie Sze, “Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis” (U of California Press, 2015)
May 19, 2015 10:19 - 59 minutesJulie Sze‘s new book opens by bringing readers into the wetlands of Dongtan, introducing us to an ambitious but unrealized project to create the “world’s first great eco-city.” Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis (University of California Press, 2015) considers Dongtan, the Chongming Island eco-development, suburban real estate developments, and other fantasies of wild and urban lives to explore the nature of eco-desire in contemporary China. Sze s...
Finis Dunaway, “Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images” (
May 11, 2015 14:40 - 55 minutesOil-soaked birds in Prince William Sound. The “crying Indian” in a 1970s anti-littering ad. A lonely polar bear on an Arctic ice floe. Such environmental images have proliferated over the past half-century, and have played a pivotal role in alerting the public about ecological problems and galvanizing public action. Yet scholars are more likely to focus on the science related to environmental problems or the policy responses to them. Finis Dunaway‘s new book, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse ...
Deborah Cowen, “The Deadly Life of Logistics” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
May 09, 2015 19:52 - 35 minutesOur guest today tells us that the seemingly straightforward field of logistics lies at the heart of contemporary globalization, imperialism, and economic inequality. Listen to Deb Cowen, the author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), discuss how the field of logistics reshaped global capitalism, undermined worker power, and even transformed how we think about life and death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone....
Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014)
April 17, 2015 11:25 - 1 hourThom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another an...
Amanda Rogers, “Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geographies of Performance” (Routledge, 2015)
March 25, 2015 13:27 - 52 minutesIdentity, performance and globalisation are at the heart of the cultural practices interrogated by Amanda Rogers in Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geography of Performance (Routledge, 2015).The book explores the global networks of theatre that have emerged between Asia, America and Europe, using a variety of policy, practice and political examples. The book argues that globalisation, and the attendant transnational flows of people and culture, has both the poten...
Carolyn Finney, “Black Faces, White Spaces” (UNC Press, 2014)
March 17, 2015 14:58 - 1 hourGeographer Carolyn Finney wrote Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), out of a frustration with the dominant environmental discourse that, she asserts, doesn’t fully take into consideration the perspectives and interests of African Americans.Finney takes care to recognize the multiplicity of African American relationships to the natural environment and to the environmental movement, broadl...
Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth” (
March 11, 2015 13:30 - 50 minutesEvolution is among the most powerful ideas in the natural sciences. Indeed, the evolutionary theoristTheodosius Dobzhansky famouslysaid nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Yet despite its central place in the life sciences, relatively few geographers employ evolutionary theory in their work. In his new book Evolutionary History:Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Edmund Russell makes a compelling case for why...
Anne Knowles, Mastering Iron (U of Chicago Press, 2013) and Geographies of the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2014)
January 30, 2015 15:21 - 49 minutesLast month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigration, or politics and raised questions about society and geography. In many ways, these nineteenth-century maps were the predecessors to the maps made through Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In the past decade, geographers and historians have begun using GIS for innovative historical research...
Susan Schulten, “Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
December 12, 2014 18:56 - 50 minutesOur everyday lives are saturated with maps. We use maps on our smart phones to help us navigate from place to place. Maps in the newspaper and online show us the spread of disease, the state of the planet, and the conflicts among nations. Susan Schulten‘s Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines how the very idea of a map radically changed it the nineteenth century. Author Susan Schulten shows the pivotal role maps...
Matthew Huber, “Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital” (U of Minnesota Press, 2013)
October 17, 2014 13:09 - 43 minutesLifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century. Author Matthew Huber shows the crucial role oil and housing policy played in the New Deal and how, in subsequent decades, government policies drove many Americans to the suburbs and increased their dependence on petroleum. Although such policies were central to suburbanization, Americans i...
Tariq Jazeel, “Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood” (Liverpool UP, 2013)
October 16, 2014 14:55 - 1 hourRuhuna National Park and ‘tropical modernism’ architecture are aesthetically analysed in Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood (Liverpool University Press, 2013) by Tariq Jazeel. The book uses these two sites to explore the ways in which non-secular experiences of nature inscribe Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism into the spaces of everyday life. Skilfully weaving together ethnographic and archival material, the book pushes us to re-read...
Stephen Legg, “Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India” (Duke UP, 2014)
October 07, 2014 17:41 - 50 minutesThe spatial politics of brothels in late-British India are the subject of Stephen Legg‘s second book Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India, published by Duke University Press in 2014. The book explores the complexities of the brothel at the urban, national and imperial scales as campaigns (and campaigners) attempted to reform prostitution. Theoretically driven by a critical reading of Foucault, the book draws on rich archival material to explore the...
Gregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013)
August 16, 2014 17:57 - 1 hourIn two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences. Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013) is a deeply contextualized study of the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake and its reverberations into the twenty-first century, arguing that the quake not only played an important role in shaping ideas about politics, religion, ...
Silver Donald Cameron, “The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea” (Red Deer Press, 2014)
August 05, 2014 11:57 - 51 minutesThe acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea (Red Deer Press, 2014), occurred to him when he was interviewing a “lean, laconic, geologist,” named Bob Taylor who works at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “A beach stores sand in dunes behind it,” Taylor said. “When it’s attacked, it draws material from the dunes for itself and for buildi...
Bradley Garrett, “Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City” (Verso, 2013)
April 15, 2014 13:54 - 46 minutesMore and more of the world is living in cities, yet we rarely stop to examine how our spaces are organised and controlled. In a remarkable new book, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso, 2013), Bradley Garrett tells the story of his urban explorations that attempt to show the space from an entirely new viewpoint. The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork with a community of urban explores that begins in London and takes on global sites in the development of what the book refers t...
John R. Gillis, “The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
February 26, 2014 05:00 - 57 minutesAmericans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coastal nation; it’s become one again. According to John R. Gillis‘s provocative new book The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the same may be said of the entire world. Humans, he says, started–or rather quickly became after they evolved in eastern Africa 200,000 ...
Timothy J. Brook, “Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer” (Bloomsbury, 2013)
November 29, 2013 19:07 - 1 hourThe story opens with a closing and closes with an opening. The closing is the sale of the map of Martin Waldseemuller, “America’s birth certificate,” for $10 million to the Library of Congress. The opening is the illumination of a grave as you, the reader, turn on a light to read the sunken stone. In the space between these two moments, each centered on a thing displayed (a map on a wall, a body under your feet), the story of a third object emerges from amid the threads of the people, languag...
Giancarlo Casale, “The Ottoman Age of Exploration” (Oxford UP, 2010)
March 18, 2011 17:04 - 1 hourYou’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t even that, because the people who lived in what we now call “Europe” didn’t think of themselves as “Europeans” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but no matter…). There were, however, other Ages of Exploration. Giancarlo Casale‘s wonderful book is about one of them, one you haven’t heard of. It...
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 ...
Peter Mancall, “Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson” (Basic Books, 2009)
September 04, 2009 19:39 - 1 hourYou’ve probably heard of the Hudson River, and you may have even heard of Hudson Bay. But have you ever heard of Henry Hudson? Well you should, and now thanks to Peter Mancall‘s page-turning Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson (Basic Books, 2009) you can. And very pleasurably at that. Hudson was an explorer. He was looking for fame and fortune, both of which happened to be located in what Europeans called the “South Sea,” that is, the Pacific Ocean. For there were found the Sp...
Colin Gordon, “Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)
May 09, 2008 19:18 - 1 hourThis week we have Professor Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa on the show talking about his new book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Professor Gordon is the author of two previous monographs, Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2004) and New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Mapping Decline b...