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New Books in History

7,892 episodes - English - Latest episode: 25 days ago - ★★★★ - 187 ratings

Interviews with Historians about their New Books
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Episodes

Justin Owen Rawlins, "Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance" (U Texas Press, 2024)

March 03, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutes

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance (U Texas Press, 2024) investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive arc...

Alvita Akiboh, "Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

March 03, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutes

This is an ambitious history of flags, stamps, and currency—and the role they played in US imperialism over the 20th century. In Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire (U Chicago Press, 2023), Alvita Akiboh, Assistant Professor of History at Yale University, reveals how US national identity has been created, challenged, and transformed through embodiments of empire found in US territories, from the US dollar bill to the fifty-star flag. Akiboh argues that these symbolic...

Roman Dziarski, "How We Outwitted and Survived the Nazis: The True Story of the Holocaust Rescuers, Zofia Sterner and Her Family" (Academic Studies, 2024)

March 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In World War II's Poland, thirty year old Zofia Sterner and her husband Wacek refuse to be classified as Jews destined for extermination. Instead, they evade the Nazis and the Soviets in several dramatic escapes and selflessly rescue many Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto and a labor camp, later becoming active participants in the Warsaw Uprising where they are taken prisoner. This retelling, captured through diaries, interviews, war crime trial testimonies, and letters, detail the Sterners' heroic...

Yaniv Feller, "The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

March 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought (Cambridge UP, 2024) discusses the life and work of Leo Baeck (1873–1956) the rabbi, public intellectual, and the official leader of German Jewry during the Holocaust. The Jewish Imperial Imagination shows the myriad ways in which the German imperial enterprise left its imprint on his religious and political thought, and on modern Judaism more generally. This book is the first to explore Baeck's religious thought as politica...

Jennifer Evans, "Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

March 02, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutes

How did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? In Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), Dr. Jennifer Evans presents a vivid history that investigates how sexual, reproductive, and genitourinary conditions were understood between 1580 and 1740. Drawing on medical sources and personal testimonies, it reveals how men responded to bouts of ill health and their relationships with the medical practitioners tasked with curing them. In do...

Kristine M. McCusker, "Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

March 02, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutes

Kristine M. McCusker's book Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955 (U Illinois Press, 2023) takes, as its focus, the combined history of death and health in the American South between 1900 and 1955. The text is ambitious in scope, and weaves together multiple oral histories to create a nuanced and engaging narrative. McCusker charts the ways in which low life expectancy in the South was regarded as problematic by commerci...

Jesse David Fox, "Comedy Book:: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work" (FSG, 2023)

March 02, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In Comedy Book:: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work (FSG, 2023), Jesse David Fox—the country’s most definitive voice in comedy criticism and someone who, in his own words, enjoys comedy “maybe more than anyone on this planet”—tackles everything you need to know about comedy, an art form that has been under-considered throughout its history, even as it has ascended as a cultural force. Weaving together history and analysis, Fox unravels the genre’s political legacy t...

Eline van Ommen, "Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War" (U California Press, 2024)

March 02, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutes

Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023) tells the story of the Sandinistas' innovative diplomatic campaign, which captured the imaginations of people around the globe and transformed Nicaraguan history at the tail end of the Cold War. The Sandinistas' diplomacy went far beyond elite politics, as thousands of musicians, politicians, teachers, activists, priests, feminists, and journalists flocked to the country to...

Ryan Wolfson-Ford, "Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos" (U Wisconsin Press, 2024)

March 01, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutes

Ryan Wolfson-Ford’s provocative new book, Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos (U Wisconsin Press, 2024), is an intellectual history of Laos during the Cold War. The book challenges the established view that Cold War Laos was a plaything of foreign powers, particularly France, the United States, and North Vietnam. It does so by mining the writings of the Lao intellectual elite to produce a revisionist history of Laos that clearly shows the Lao as agents of the...

Thomas J. Barfield, "Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History" (Princeton UP, 2023)

March 01, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutes

Empires are one of the most common forms of political structure in history—yet no empire is alike. We have our “standard” view of empire: perhaps the Romans, or the China of the Qin and Han Dynasties—vast polities that cover numerous different people, knit together by strong institutions from a political center. But where do, say, the empires of the steppe, like the Xiongnu or the Mongols, fit into our understanding of empire? Or the Portuguese empire, which got its start as an array of ports...

Fynn Holm, "The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600-2019" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

February 29, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutes

Japan is often imagined as a nation with a long history of whaling. In The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600-2019 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Fynn Holm argues that for centuries some regions in early modern Japan did not engage in whaling. In fact, they were actively opposed to it, even resorting to violence when whales were killed. Resistance against whaling was widespread especially in the Northeast among the Japanese fishermen who worshiped whales as the ...

Upal Chakrabarti, "Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

February 29, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the area's landed militia, began agitating against the East India Company's government, burning down government buildings and looting the treasury. While the attacks were initially understood as an attempt to return the territory's native ruler to power, investigations following the rebellion's suppression traced the cause back to the introduction of a model of revenue governance unsuited to lo...

Carly Goodman, "Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction" (UNC Press, 2023)

February 29, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that. Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction (UNC Press, 2023) tells the surprising ...

Christian R. Burset, "An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy" (Yale UP, 2023)

February 29, 2024 05:00 - 44 minutes

In An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. Christian R. Burset presents a compelling reexamination of how Britain used law to shape its empire. For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) as the world’s most powerful empire. At that point, imperial p...

Carol Beggy, "Pencil" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

February 28, 2024 10:00 - 57 minutes

A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and to essentially destroy it. Pencils were used to sketch civilization's greatest works of art. Pencils were there marking the choices in the earliest democratic elections. Even when used haphazardly to mark out where a saw's blade should make a cut, a pencil is creating. Pencil offers a deep look at this common, almost ubiquitous, object. Pencils a...

Peter Harmsen, "Bernhard Sindberg: The Schindler of Nanjing" (Casemate, 2024)

February 28, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In December 1937, the Chinese capital, Nanjing, falls and the Japanese army unleash an orgy of torture, murder, and rape. Over the course of six weeks, hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war are killed. At the very onset of the atrocities, the Danish supervisor at a cement plant just outside the city, 26-year-old Bernhard Arp Sindberg, opens the factory gates and welcomes in 10,000 Chinese civilians to safety, beyond the reach of the blood-thirsty Japanese. He becomes an Asia...

Sara J. Grossman, "Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy" (Duke UP, 2023)

February 28, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutes

In Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy (Duke UP, 2023), Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions used information about the weather to establish and reinforce the foundations of a white patriarch...

Maxine Lowy, "Latent Memory: Human Rights and Jewish Identity in Chile" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)

February 27, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants and refugees sought to rebuild their lives in Chile. Despite their personal histories of marginalization in Europe, many of these people or their descendants did not take a stand against the 1973 military coup, nor the political persecution that followed. Chilean Jews' collective failure to repudiate systematic human rights violations and their tacit support for the military dictatorship reflected a complicated moral calculus that ...

Judith Pearson, "Crusade to Heal America: The Remarkable Life of Mary Lasker" (Mayo Clinic Press, 2023)

February 27, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutes

Mary Woodard Lasker had a singular goal: saving lives by increasing medical research. Together with her husband, advertising genius Albert, they created the Lasker Foundation, bestowing the Lasker Awards. Known as the "American Nobels," these became the most prestigious research awards in America. The Laskers' next step was transforming the sleepy and ineffectual American Society for the Control of Cancer, reinventing it as the American Cancer Society in 1944. But the real increase in medical...

Obert Bernard Mlambo, "Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe: Veterans, Masculinity and War" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

February 27, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In this highly original book Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe: Veterans, Masculinity and War (Bloomsbury, 2022), Dr. Obert Bernard Mlambo offers a comparative and critical examination of the relationship between military veterans and land expropriation in the client-army of the first-century BC Roman Republic and veterans of the Zimbabwean liberation war. The study centres on the body of the soldier, the cultural production of images and representations of gender w...

Ned Richardson-Little, "The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

February 26, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany (Cambridge UP, 2020), Ned Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berl...

Charles B. Jones, "Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: Understanding a Tradition of Practice" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)

February 26, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Today’s guest is Charles B. Jones, Associate Professor and Director of the Religion and Culture graduate program in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America. He will be speaking with us about his new book Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: Understanding a Tradition of Practice, just published in the Pure Land Buddhist Studies series with University of Hawaiʻi Press. Jones is the author is several articles and books, including Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and...

Peter Harmsen, "Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze" (Casemate, 2015)

February 26, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Peter Harmsen's book Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Casemate, 2015) describes one of the great forgotten battles of the 20th century. At its height it involved nearly a million Chinese and Japanese soldiers while sucking in three million civilians as unwilling spectators and victims. It turned what had been a Japanese adventure in China into a general war between the two oldest and proudest civilizations of the Far East. Ultimately, it led to Pearl Harbor and to seven decades of tu...

Stanley Wells, "What Was Shakespeare Really Like?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

February 26, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutes

Sir Stanley Wells is one of the world's greatest authorities on William Shakespeare. Here he brings a lifetime of learning and reflection to bear on some of the most tantalising questions about the poet and dramatist that there are. How did he think, feel, and work? What were his relationships like? What did he believe about death? What made him laugh? This freshly thought and immensely engaging study wrestles with fundamental debates concerning Shakespeare's personality and life. The mysteri...

Ivo Goldstein and Slavko Goldstein, "The Holocaust in Croatia" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016)

February 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

The Holocaust in Croatia (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016) recounts the history of the Croatian Jewish community during the Second World War, with a focus on the city of Zagreb. Ivo and Slavko Goldstein have grounded their study on extensive research in recently opened archives, additionally aided by the memories of survivors to supplement and enrich the interpretation of documents. The authors' accessible narrative, here available in English for the first time, has been praised for its objectivity ...

Marcia Bricker Halperin, "Kibbitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow's Cafeteria" (Cornell UP, 2023)

February 25, 2024 09:00 - 33 minutes

In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. The cafeterias were also places where working class a...

Ariel Mae Lambe, "No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War" (UNC Press, 2019)

February 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Ariel Mae Lambe’s new book No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) is a history of transnational Cuban activists who mobilized in the mid-1930s to fight fascism both in Cuba and beyond. A wide variety of civic and political groups, including Communists, anarchists, Freemasons, and Afro-Cubans, mobilized to support the Spanish Republican cause, which they connected to their efforts at home to fight persisting colonial st...

Sarah Keyes, "American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

February 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

The Overland Trail into the American West is one of the most culturally recognizable symbols of the American past: white covered wagons traversing the plains, filled with heroic pioneers embodying the nation's manifest destiny. In American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), University of Nevada assistant professor of history Sarah Keyes rewrites that well-worn story. Keyes book focuses on a topic that was at the forefront of the minds ...

Angela Wanhalla, "Of Love and War: Pacific Brides of World War II" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

February 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Between 1942 and 1945 more than two million servicemen occupied the southern Pacific theater, the majority of whom were Americans in service with the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. During the occupation, American servicemen married approximately 1,800 women from New Zealand and the island Pacific, creating legal bonds through marriage and through children. Additionally, American servicemen fathered an estimated four thousand nonmarital children with Indigenous women in the South Pac...

Daniel Dain, "A History of Boston" (Peter E. Randall, 2023)

February 24, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Boston is today one of the world's greatest cities, first in higher education, hospitals, life science companies, and sports teams. It was the home of the Great Puritan Migration, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the first civil rights movement, the abolition movement, and the women's rights movement. But the city that gave us the first use of ether as anesthesia, the telephone, technicolor film, and the mutual fund--the city where Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott f...

Bojan Aleksov, "Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933-1945" (Brill, 2023)

February 24, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

The Balkans provided the escape route for tens of thousands of German Jews, and remained a place of refuge until the Nazis brutally shut it off with the mass murder of Jewish refugees on the so-called Kladovo transport starting in September 1941, which can be considered as the beginning of the Holocaust in Europe.  Responding to publications about the Western European and American exile experience of the Jews after 1933, Bojan Aleksov's book Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933-1945 (Brill, 2...

Till Van Rahden, "Multiplicity: Jewish History and the Ambivalences of Universalism" (Hamburger Editionen, 2022)

February 24, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutes

Since the Enlightenment, the question has arisen as to how it is possible to think of the “unity of the human race” as a multiplicity. How can the promise of universal equality be combined with the claim to diversity? In Vielheit: Jüdische Geschichte und die Ambivalenzen des Universalismus (Hamburger Editionen, 2022), Till van Rahden takes up this central theme of European modernity through the example of Jewish history. The more the ideal of equality gained in importance, the fiercer the dis...

Matthew Fox-Amato, "Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America" (Oxford UP, 2019)

February 24, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutes

Shortly after its introduction, photography transformed the ways Americans made political arguments using visual images. In the mid-19th century, photographs became key tools in debates surrounding slavery. Yet, photographs were used in interesting and sometimes surprising ways by a range of actors. Matthew Fox-Amato, an Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho, examines the role of photography in the politics of slavery during the 19th century and the important legacies of those uses o...

Devin O. Pendas, "Democracy, Nazi Trials and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–1950" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

February 23, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutes

In his new book, Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Devin O. Pendas examines how German courts conducted Nazi trials in the immediate postwar context. His work combines close readings of legal discourses in conjunction with very human stories to present a narrative of both irony and tragedy. In a masterful comparison of all four occupation zones, this book successfully musters historical data to challenge and overturn...

Imani D. Owens, "Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean" (Columbia UP, 2023)

February 23, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators’ rela...

Michael Kimmage, "Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability" (Oxford UP, 2024)

February 23, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutes

One war, three collisions: Russia with Ukraine, Europe, and the US. On the second anniversary of the full-scale invasion, Michael Kimmage analyses the disparate factors that led to war in Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (OUP Press, 2024). "After a few anomalous years of peace, Europe became in 2022 what it has always been, an epicentre of conflict, the fault line around which the biggest and worst geopolitical earthquakes tend to occur". A member o...

Raanan Rein, "Populism and Ethnicity: Peronism and the Jews of Argentina" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020)

February 23, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Juan Perón's decade-long regime, from 1946 to 1955, is often presented as Nazi-fascist and antisemitic - claims that are strongly rooted in Argentina's collective unconscious and popular culture. Challenging this widely held view, Raanan Rein asserts that there was greater Jewish support for Perón than previously believed, and that fewer antisemitic incidents took place in Argentina during Perón's rule than during any other period in the twentieth century.  Recovering the silenced voices of J...

Gregory D. Smithers, "Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)

February 23, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In his book, Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal(University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Dr. Gregory D. Smithers effectively articulates the complex history of Native Southerners. Smithers conveys the history of Native Southerners through numerous historical eras while properly reinterpreting popular misconceptions about the past in a way that is compelling and easy to understand. Smithers expresses the rich and complex history of Native Southerners as it was while exp...

Marko Attila Hoare, "Serbia: A Modern History" (Oxford UP, 2024)

February 22, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutes

“Serbia is a country that has inspired exceptional intellectual interest,” writes Marko Marko Attila Hoare in Serbia: A Modern History (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2024). “It was centrally involved in the crises marking both the start and end of Europe’s 20th century: the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the Wars of Yugoslav Succession beginning in 1991. Yet this interest has not translated into a large English-language historiography of the country”. This exhaustive political history of Serbia from ...

Harriet Lyon, "Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

February 22, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutes

The dissolution of the monasteries was recalled by individuals and communities alike as a seismic rupture in the religious, cultural, and socio-economic fabric of early modern England. It was also profoundly important in shaping contemporary historical consciousness, the topographical imagination, and local tradition. Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2021) by Dr. Harriet Lyon is a book about the dissolution of the monasteries a...

Knut A. Jacobsen, "The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diasporas" (Oxford UP, 2023)

February 22, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutes

Knut A. Jacobsen's edited volume The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diaspora (Oxford UP, 2023) presents the histories and religious traditions of Hindus with a South Asian ancestral background living outside of South Asia. Hinduism is a global religion with a significant presence in many countries throughout the world. The most important cause of this global expansion is migration. This book presents and analyses the most important of the geographies, migration histories, religious traditi...

Isabella Alexander, "Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

February 22, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutes

Isabella Alexander's book Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores the intertwined histories of mapmaking and copyright law in Britain from the early modern period up to World War 1, focusing chiefly on the 18th and 19th centuries. Taking a multidisciplinary approach and making extensive use of the archival record, this is the first detailed, historical account of the relationship between maps and copyright. As such, it...

Simon Partner, "Koume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration" (Columbia UP, 2023)

February 22, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In 1864, on a midsummer’s day, Kawai Koume, a 60-year old matriarch of a samurai family in Wakayama, makes a note in her diary, which she had dutifully written in for over three decades. There are reports of armed clashes in Kyoto. It’s said that the emperor has ordered the expulsion of the foreigners, and it’s also said that a large band of vagabond soldiers has gathered in Senju in Edo. It’s said that in Edo people are wearing their [winter] kimono linings, and in Nikko it has been snowing....

T. Corey Brennan, "The Fasces: A History of Ancient Rome's Most Dangerous Political Symbol" (Oxford UP, 2022)

February 21, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutes

"Fascism" is a word ubiquitous in our contemporary political discourse, but few know about its roots in the ancient past or its long, strange evolution to the present. In ancient Rome, the fasces were a bundle of wooden rods bound with a leather cord, in which an axe was placed—in essence, a mobile kit for corporal or capital punishment. Attendants typically carried fasces before Rome's higher officials, to induce feelings of respect and fear for the relevant authority. This highly performati...

Jonathan A. C. Brown, "Slavery and Islam" (Oneworld Academic, 2019)

February 21, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In his majestic and encyclopedic new book Slavery and Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2019), Jonathan A. C. Brown presents a sweeping analysis of Muslim intellectual, political, and social entanglements with slavery, and some of the thorniest conceptual and ethical problems involved in defining and writing about slavery. Self-reflective and bold, Slavery and Islam also offers a remarkable combination of intellectual and social history, anchored in layers of complex yet eminently accessible textual ...

Max Ward, "Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan" (Duke UP, 2019)

February 21, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Max Ward’s Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes the trajectory and transformations of the implementation of Japan’s 1925 Peace Preservation Law from its conception until the early years of the 1940s. The law, which began as a state effort to tamp down radicalism and “dangerous thought” (mostly Marxism) and preserve and protect imperial sovereignty, spawned a massive apparatus populated by both state and nonstate actors dedicated to i...

Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, "Tudor Networks of Power" (Oxford UP, 2023)

February 21, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutes

Tudor Networks of Power (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Ruth Ahnert & Dr. Sebastian Ahnert is the product of a groundbreaking collaboration between an early modern book historian and a physicist specialising in complex networks. Together they have reconstructed and computationally analysed the networks of intelligence, diplomacy, and political influence across a century of Tudor history (1509-1603), based on the British State Papers. The 130,000 letters that survive in the State Papers...

Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, "American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15" (FSG, 2023)

February 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century. In American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (FSG, 2023), the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from incepti...

Emily Legg, "Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907" (Utah State UP, 2023)

February 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907 (Utah State University Press, 2023) recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices by critically weaving together pedagogy and archival artifacts with Cherokee traditional stories and Indigenous worldviews. This unique text adds these voices to writing studies history and presents these stories as models of...

Robert Louis Wilken, "Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom" (Yale UP, 2019)

February 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of religion. Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019) offers a revisionist history of how the ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion originated in the writings of the Christian fathers of the early Church, such as Tertullian an...

Guests

Colin Grant
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Dan Jones
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Jared Diamond
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Malcolm Harris
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Margaret Mitchell
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Mike Duncan
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Reza Aslan
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Sarah Churchwell
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Books

The Second World War
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The Final Solution
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China and Japan
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The Age of Reason
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The Tale of Genji
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Death in Berlin
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Gone with the Wind
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History of Beauty
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In the Beginning
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Made In America
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The End of Days
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The Great Gatsby
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The Ivory Tower
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The Long Shadow
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The Middle Passage
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The Roman Empire
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The White House
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