New Books in History
8,375 episodes - English - Latest episode: 11 days ago - ★★★★ - 190 ratingsInterviews with Historians about their New Books
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Episodes
Eric Thompson, "The Story of Southeast Asia" (NUS Press, 2024)
July 11, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDoes Southeast Asia “exist”? It’s a real question: Southeast Asia is a geographic region encompassing many different cultures, religions, political styles, historical experiences, and languages, economies. Can we think of this part of the world as one cohesive “place”? Eric Thompson, in his book The Story of Southeast Asia (NUS Press: 2024), suggests that we can, as he tells the region’s history from way back in prehistory, through its time as Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms, the introduction of ...
Theresa McCulla, "Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
July 11, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor. In Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (U Chicago Press, 2024), Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses...
Gayle K. Brunelle and Stephanie Finley-Croswhite, "Assassination in Vichy: Marx Dormoy and the Struggle for the Soul of France" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
July 11, 2024 08:00 - 2 hoursDuring the night of 25 July 1941, assassins planted a time bomb in the bed of the former French Interior Minister, Marx Dormoy. The explosion on the following morning launched a two-year investigation that traced Dormoy's murder to the highest echelons of the Vichy regime. Dormoy, who had led a 1937 investigation into the "Cagoule," a violent right-wing terrorist organization, was the victim of a captivating revenge plot. Based on the meticulous examination of thousands of documents, Assassin...
Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next
July 11, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesWatching the footage of the January 6 insurrection, Professor Bradley Onishi wondered: If I hadn't left evangelicalism, would I have been there? Today’s book is: Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next (Broadleaf Books, 2023), by Dr. Bradley Onishi, which unpacks recent U.S. history to show how the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 was not a blip or an aberration. It was the logical outcome of years of a White evan...
The (ir)Rational Priests: On Ignacio Martín-Baró and Liberation Psychology
July 11, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesA group of landholding elites waged psychological warfare on the El Salvadoran people, and oppressed them for generations. When a psychologist and Jesuit priest defended the rationality of the people against their oppressors, he paid the ultimate price. This is episode three of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit ...
William Gow, "Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community" (Stanford UP, 2024)
July 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThis episode features a conversation with Dr. William Gow on his recently published book, Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community (Stanford University Press, 2024), focuses on the 1930s and 1940s Los Angeles–its Chinatowns, and “city,” as well as the Chinese American community’s relationship with Hollywood. Chinatown and Hollywood, Gow argues, represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial difference for popular audi...
Kellie Carter Jackson, "We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance" (Seal Press, 2024)
July 10, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesBlack resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024), historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women. The dismissal of “Black violence” as an illegitimat...
Sasha Warren, "Storming Bedlam: Madness, Mental Health, and Revolt" (Common Notions, 2024)
July 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourMental health care and its radical possibilities reimagined in the context of its global development under capitalism. The contemporary world is oversaturated with psychiatric programs, methods, and reforms promising to address any number of "crises" in mental health care. When these fail, alternatives to the alternatives simply pile up and seem to lead nowhere. In an original and compelling account of radical experimentation in psychiatry, Warren traces a double movement in the global develo...
Karine Varley, "Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
July 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourKarine Varley's book Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War (Cambridge UP, 2023) advances a significant new interpretation of French collaboration during the Second World War. Arguing that the path to collaboration involved not merely Nazi Germany but Fascist Italy, it suggests that the Vichy French government was caught in a double bind. On the one hand, many of the threats to France's territory, colonial empire and power came from ...
Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb, "The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics" (Oxford UP, 2021)
July 09, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesThe story of four remarkable women who shaped the intellectual history of the 20th century: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. On the cusp of the Second World War, four women went to Oxford to begin their studies: a fiercely brilliant Catholic convert; a daughter of privilege longing to escape her stifling upbringing; an ardent Communist and aspiring novelist with a list of would-be lovers as long as her arm; and a quiet, messy lover of newts and mice who would...
Neil J. Young, "Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
July 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourComing Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (U Chicago Press, 2024) is a fascinating and engaging historical tour of those who were gay and active in Republican and conservative politics over the course of the last 80 years. Neil J. Young has written an accessible and deeply sources book that brings forward stories about those in the closet, those out of the closet, and in some cases, the move to come out as gay in Republican politics and in conservative activism. Young explains early o...
Ed Simon, "Devil's Contract: A History of the Faustian Bargain" (Melville House, 2024)
July 09, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesFrom ancient times to the modern world, the idea of the Faustian bargain—the exchange of one’s soul in return for untold riches and power—has exerted a magnetic pull upon our collective imaginations. In Devil's Contract: A History of the Faustian Bargain (Melville House, 2024), Dr. Ed Simon takes us on a historical tour of the Faustian bargain, from the Bible to blues, and illustrates how the instinct for sacrificing our principles in exchange for power models all kinds of social ills, from c...
David Alff, "The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
July 09, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesTraversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. Dr. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the Hi...
Laura Robson, "Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work" (Verso, 2023)
July 09, 2024 08:00 - 51 minutesWhen Americans and other citizens of advanced capitalist countries think of humanitarianism, they think of charitable efforts to help people displaced by war, disaster, and oppression find new homes where they can live complete lives. However, as the historian Laura Robson argues in her book Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work (Verso, 2023), the history of the international refugee regime is much less noble than the self-representation of humanitarian organizations (and the ...
Donna Drucker, "Contraception: A Concise History" (The MIT Press, 2020)
July 08, 2024 08:00 - 23 minutesThe beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In Contraception: A Concise History (The MIT Press, 2020), Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, ...
Jurgen Buchenau and Timothy Henderson, "The Mexican Revolution: A Documentary History" (Hackett, 2022)
July 08, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Mexican Revolution: A Documentary History (Hackett, 2022), "Henderson and Buchenau have done an excellent and thoughtful job of collecting a wide range of voices for students to learn about the Mexican Revolution and its causes, both from ‘above’ and from ‘below’. I’m particularly appreciative of the authors’ inclusion of women’s voices and women’s issues of the era, including the point of view of the first woman elected to public office in Mexico. They deserve praise for including doc...
Robert E. Jones, "Priesthood, Cult, and Temple in the Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran: Analyzing a Pre-Hasmonean Jewish Literary Tradition" (Brill, 2023)
July 08, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesThe Hellenistic period was a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish priesthood. The waning days of the Persian empire coincided with the continued ascendance of the high priest and Jerusalem temple as powerful political, cultural, and religious institutions in Judea. The Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran, only recently published in full, testify to the existence of a flourishing but previously unknown Jewish literary tradition dating from the end of Persian rule to the rise of the Hasmoneans. ...
Kathryn Hughes, "Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)
July 07, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesIn 1900, Britain and America were in the grip of a cat craze. An animal that had for centuries been seen as a household servant or urban nuisance had now become an object of pride and deep affection. From presidential and royal families who imported exotic breeds to working-class men competing for cash prizes for the fattest tabby, people became enthralled to the once-humble cat. Multiple industries sprang up to feed this new obsession, selling everything from veterinary services to leather b...
Russell Sandberg and Daniel Newman, "Law and Humanities" (Anthem Press, 2024)
July 07, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Law and Humanities (Anthem Press, 2024), Professor Russell Sandberg and Dr Daniel Newman provide an accessible introduction to the law and humanities. Each chapter explores the nature, development and possible further trajectory of a disciplinary ‘law and’ field, tackling a wide ranging series of topics as law and geography, law and history, law and literature, law and theatre. Each chapter is written by an expert in the respective field and addresses how the two disciplines of law and the...
Tabitha Stanmore, "Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic" (Bloombury, 2024)
July 07, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesImagine: it's the year 1600 and you've lost your precious silver spoons, or maybe they've been stolen. Perhaps your child has a fever. Or you're facing a trial. Maybe you're looking for love or escaping a husband. What do you do? In medieval and early modern Europe, your first port of call might have been cunning folk: practitioners of “service magic.” Neither feared (like witches), nor venerated (like saints), they were essential to daily life. For people across ages, genders, and social ran...
Timothy Barnard, "Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City" (NUS Press, 2024)
July 06, 2024 08:00 - 31 minutesIn Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City (NUS Press, 2024), historian Tim Barnard and his colleagues offer an edited volume of historical and ecological analysis, in which various institutions, perspectives and events involving animals provide insight into the development of Singapore as a modern, urban nation-state, highlighting some of the challenges of planning and development. The book asks the reader to see Singapore's myriad creatures not as mer...
Timothy Grieve-Carlson, "American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius" (Oxford UP, 2024)
July 06, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAmerican Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius (Oxford UP, 2024) explores the impact of climate change on early modern radical religious groups during the height of the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century. Focusing on the life and legacy of Johannes Kelpius (1667-1707), an enormously influential but comprehensively misunderstood theologian who settled outside of Philadelphia from 1604 to 1707, Timothy Grieve-Carlson explores the Hermetic and alchemical dimen...
Jeremy Black, "A World History of Rail: From the Steam Regime to Today" (Amberley Publishing, 2023)
July 06, 2024 08:00 - 22 minutesThere were 20,000 miles of railways in 1865 and about a million by 2020. Scale has always been a key theme in railway history. In the First World War, the London and North West Railway transported 325,000 miles of barbed wire and over twelve million pairs of army boots. At the end of the twentieth century, Indian Railways sold 4.5 billion tickets annually. In A World History of Rail: From the Steam Regime to Today (Amberley Publishing, 2023), Jeremy Black examines how rail transformed the wor...
Elizabeth Storr Cohen and Marlee J. Couling, "Non-Elite Women's Networks Across the Early Modern World" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
July 06, 2024 08:00 - 47 minutesElizabeth Cohen, Professor Emerita at York University, joins Jana Byars to talk about her new volume, Non-Elite Women's Networks Across the Early Modern World (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), edited with Marilee Couling. Non-elite or marginalized early modern women-among them the poor, migrants, members of religious or ethnic minorities, abused or abandoned wives, servants, and sex workers-have seldom left records of their experiences. Drawing on a variety of sources, including trial recor...
The (ir)Rational Rainbow (the DSM & the Fight to Depathologize Homosexuality)
July 06, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe psychological establishment has long pathologized diverse forms of sexual identity and gender expression. In the mid-century, a brave movement of gays and lesbians fought back and claimed: no, actually, we’re healthy. But in the process, did they define other identities unhealthy? This is episode two of Cited Podcast's returning season, the Rationality Wars. It tells stories about the political and intellectual battles to define rationality and irrational. For the rest of the series, visi...
Ellen Gough, "Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
July 06, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourJainism originated in India and shares some features with Buddhism and Hinduism, but it is a distinct tradition with its own key texts, art, rituals, beliefs, and history. One important way it has often been distinguished from Buddhism and Hinduism is through the highly contested category of Tantra: Jainism, unlike the others, does not contain a tantric path to liberation. But in Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation (U Chicago Press, 2021), historia...
Marsha Gordon, "Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott" (U California Press, 2024)
July 05, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourCredited with popularizing the label "ex-wife" in 1929, Ursula Parrott wrote provocatively about divorcées, career women, single mothers, work-life balance, and a host of new challenges facing modern women. Her best sellers, Hollywood film deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law made her a household name. Part biography, part cultural history, Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (U California Press, 2024) establishes Parrott's...
Tara Ward, "Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram" (U California Press, 2024)
July 05, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesWhat does an art history of Instagram look like? Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Tara Ward reveals how Instagram shifts long-established ways of interacting with images. Dr. Ward argues Instagram is a structure of the visual, which includes not just the process of looking, but what can be seen and by whom. She examines features of Instagram use, including the effect of scrolling through images on a phone, the skill involved ...
Elizabeth Aislinn O'Brien, "Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940" (UNC Press, 2023)
July 05, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesIn Surgery & Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Elizabeth O’Brien foregrounds the racial and religious meanings of surgery to draw important connections between historical and contemporary politics regarding fetal and maternal healthcare. She traces practices of caesarean section and coercive Christianization throughout Mexico’s colonial period; patriarchal pregnancy management during republican state formation; and ...
Jeremy Black, "Defoe's Britain" (St. Augustine's Press, 2023)
July 05, 2024 08:00 - 24 minutesThe Weight of Words Series continues with Defoe's Britain (St. Augustine's Press, 2023), as historian Jeremy Black uses this writer to interpret Britain in the late 1600s, and likewise looks to the times to interpret the fiction. As seen in previous studies on Christie, Smollett, Fielding, and the Gothic novelists, Black tells the story of the story-teller, and presents the picture of British nationalism that "was the product, history, and record of struggle--collective and individual--as wel...
Racism as Power Relation: A Discussion with Adaner Usmani (EF, JP)
July 04, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesDo we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power relations can produce racially differentiated outcomes? Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard and on the editorial board at Catalyst joined Elizabeth and John back in Fall, 2020, to wrestle with the subtle and complex genealogy of Southern plantation economy and...
John Soluri, "Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia" (UNC Press, 2024)
July 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourToday, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalisation. Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) by Dr. John Soluri upends this, revealing how the exploitation of animals—terrestrial and marine, domesticated and wild, living and dead—was central to the region's transformation from Indigenous lands into the national territories of Argentina and Chi...
Sigrid Schönfelder, "'Gold Fever' and Women: Transformations in Lives, Health Care and Medicine in the 19th Century American West" (Transcript, 2023)
July 03, 2024 08:00 - 45 minutesThroughout its history, the American West symbolized a place of hope and new beginnings, where anything was possible, especially for men. However, the history written until the 1970s and 1980s excluded women. In 'Gold Fever' and Women: Transformations in Lives, Health Care and Medicine in the 19th Century American West (Transcript, 2023), Sigrid Schönfelder illustrates how the American West served as a catalytic gold mine for many transformations for women. It draws on the life narratives...
Samuel Dolbee, "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
July 03, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesIn this episode, I talk to Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wi...
Daniel Susskind, "Growth: A History and a Reckoning" (Harvard UP, 2024)
July 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDaniel Susskind examines the brief and powerful history of economic growth and puts it into perspective with human prosperity in Growth: A History and a Reckoning (Harvard UP, 2024). Susskind acknowledges the tremendous benefits of economic growth, which he credits with freeing billions of people from poverty and allowing us to live longer and healthier lives. He also recognizes the real and substantial costs of our relentless pursuit of growth at the expense of other considerations and moral...
Miranda Sachs, "An Age to Work: Working-Class Childhood in Third Republic Paris" (Oxford UP, 2023)
July 02, 2024 08:00 - 27 minutesChildhood as lived during the French Third Republic was very different from childhood during the modern era. Working-class children laboured alongside adults in the home, on the streets, and in places of work. French authorities sought to change this and redefine childhood by means of government organizations, separate legal structures, and schools for delinquent children. French authorities visited places of work, schools, and interviewed parents. Yet gender based divisions between males and...
Faith Smith, "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century" (Duke UP, 2023)
July 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century (Duke UP, 2023), Faith Smith engages with a period in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean often overlooked as nondescript, quiet, and embarrassingly pro-imperial within the larger narrative of Jamaican and Trinidadian nationalism. Between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I, British imperialism was taken for granted among both elites and ordinary people, while nationalist discourses wo...
Holly Ashford, "Development and Women's Reproductive Health in Ghana, 1920-1982" (Routledge, 2022)
July 02, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesBetween the 1920s and 1980s, the choices that Ghanaian women made regarding their reproductive health were defined by development policy and practice. Spanning the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods, Holly Ashford's book Development and Women's Reproductive Health in Ghana, 1920-1982 (Routledge, 2022) demonstrates that whilst the substance of development discourse shifted over time, principles of development continued to be used to impact and legitimise reproductive health policy and...
Ben Wright, "Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism" (LSU Press, 2020)
July 02, 2024 08:00 - 22 minutesBen Wright's Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism (LSU Press, 2020) demonstrates how religion structured the possibilities and limitations of American abolitionism during the early years of the republic. From the American Revolution through the eruption of schisms in the three largest Protestant denominations in the 1840s, this comprehensive work lays bare the social and religious divides that culminated in secession and civil war. Historians often e...
Travis B. Williams et al., "The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture" (Brill, 2023)
July 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourMedia studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture (Brill, 2023) is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related disciplines reviewing how scholarship has addressed issues of ancient media in the past, assessing the use of media criticism in current research,...
Rachel Williams, "Tabernacles in the Wilderness: The US Christian Commission on the Civil War Battlefront" (Kent State UP, 2024)
June 30, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesExamining how a civilian organization used the Civil War to advance their religious mission. Tabernacles in the Wilderness: The US Christian Commission on the Civil War Battlefront (Kent State UP, 2024) discusses the work of the United States Christian Commission (USCC), a civilian relief agency established by northern evangelical Protestants to minister to Union troops during the American Civil War. USCC workers saw in the Civil War not only a wrathful judgment from God for the sins of the n...
Michael Sonenscher, "Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word" (Princeton UP, 2022)
June 30, 2024 08:00 - 51 minutesWhat exactly is capitalism? How has the meaning of capitalism changed over time? And what’s at stake in our understanding or misunderstanding of it? In Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton UP, 2022), Michael Sonenscher examines the history behind the concept and pieces together the range of subjects bound up with the word. Sonenscher shows that many of our received ideas fail to pick up the work that the idea of capitalism is doing for us, without us even realizing it. “Capitalism...
Bayley J. Marquez, "Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space" (U California Press, 2024)
June 30, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThroughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, teachers, administrators, and policymakers fashioned a system of industrial education that attempted to transform Black and Indigenous peoples and land. This form of teaching—what Bayley J. Marquez names plantation pedagogy—was built on the claim that slavery and land dispossession are fundamentally educational. Plantation pedagogy and the formal institutions that encompassed it were thus integrally tied to enslavement, settlement, and their ...
Peter Murray Jones, "The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)
June 30, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesFriars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late mediaeval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are the people we think of immediately as agents of healing; whilst we identify university teachers as authorities on medical writings. Yet from their first appearance in England in the 1220s to the dispersal of the friaries in the 1530s, four orders of friars were active as healers of every type. Their care extended beyond the circle of their own ...
Shahmima Akhtar, "Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, Race and Nation, c. 1850-1970" (Manchester UP, 2024)
June 30, 2024 08:00 - 18 minutesShahmima Akhtar is a historian of race, migration and empire and an assistant professor of Black and Asian British History at the University of Birmingham. She previously worked at the Royal Historical Society to improve BME representation in UK History, whether working with schools and the curriculum, cultural institutions, community groups or other learned societies. Dr. Akhtar has also worked closely with museums and heritage sites as a researcher and consultant on shaping histories of the...
David H. Wilson, "Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
June 29, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBetween the mid-19th century and the start of the twentieth century, the Northern Paiute people of the Great Basin went from a self-sufficient tribe well-adapted to living on the harsh desert homelands, to a people singled out by the Native activist Henry Roe Cloud for their dire social and economic position. The story of how this happened is told in Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country (Bison Books, 2022) by David H. Wilson, Jr. By focusing on the human s...
Michelle Gordon and Rachel O ́Sullivan, "Colonial Paradigms of Violence: Comparative Analysis of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Killing" (Wallstein, 2022)
June 29, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn recent years, scholars have rediscovered Hannah Arendt`s "boomerang thesis" – the "coming home" of European colonialism as genocide on European soil – as well as Raphael Lemkin`s work around his definition of genocide and the importance of its colonial dimensions. Germany and other European states are increasingly engaging in debates on comparing the Holocaust to other genocides and cases of mass killing, memorialization, "decolonization" and attempts to come to terms with the past ("Verga...
The (ir)Rational Mob: On the Life and Legacy of Gustave Le Bon
June 29, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesEvery protest movement has been dismissed as a mere ‘mindless mob,’ caught in a psychological frenzy. Where did this idea come from, and why does it last? Gustave Le Bon. This is episode one of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. You can also hear a trailer of next week’s episode, the (ir)Rational...
Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, "An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948" (Columbia UP, 2024)
June 29, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesIn Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends began to meet at the bar of the King David Hotel. This group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals—among them Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sally Kassab, Walid Khalidi, and Rasha Salam, some of whom would go on to become acclaimed authors, scholars, and critics—came together across religious lines in a fleeting moment of possibility within a troubled history. What brought these Musli...
Denva Gallant, "Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy" (Penn State UP, 2024)
June 29, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesDuring the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Laypeople and religious alike learned about their rituals not only through readings from the Vitae Patrum (Lives of the Desert Fathers) and sermons but also through the images that brought their stories to life. In Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Penn State University Press...