New Books in History
8,133 episodes - English - Latest episode: 13 days ago - ★★★★ - 190 ratingsInterviews with Historians about their New Books
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Episodes
Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesThe first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In her debut book, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health (UNC Press, 2019), historian Jennifer Thomson revisits canonical figures and events from the environmental movement in the United States and finds everywhere talk of health. At its best, viewing the environment through the lens of health encouraged decentr...
Robert Michael Morrissey, "People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America" (U Washington Press, 2022)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourBy putting the Midwest at the center of Vast Early America, University of Illinois historian Robert Morrissey reconfigures the power dynamics in the story of North America during the era of colonialism. In his award-winning People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America (U Washington Press, 2022), Morrissey tells a story that centers the edge - the places where the vast American prairies meet the forests of the Great Lakes. This "ecotone" region is a zo...
Mark Monmonier, "Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography" (ESRI Press, 2019)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography (ESRI Press, 2019), cartographic cogitator Mark Monmonier shares his insights about the relationships between networks and maps through a collection of essays. Using historical maps, he explores: triangulation networks used to establish the baselines of a map’s scale; astronomical observations, ellipsoids, geodetic arcs, telegraph networks, and GPS constellations that establish latitude and longitude at control...
Brandon Presser, "The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania and Mutiny in the South Pacific" (Icon Books, 2022)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesIn 1808, an American merchant ship happened upon an uncharted island in the South Pacific and unwittingly solved the biggest nautical mystery of the era: the whereabouts of a band of fugitives who, after seizing their vessel, had disappeared into the night with their Tahitian companions. Seven generations later, the island is still inhabited by descendants of the original mutineers, marooned like modern castaways. In 2018, Brandon Presser went to live among its families; two clans bound by ci...
Ofer Ashkenazi, "Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
January 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAnti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (U Michigan Press, 2020) studies an overlooked yet fundamental element of German popular culture in the twentieth century. In tracing Jewish filmmakers' contemplations of "Heimat"-- a provincial German landscape associated with belonging and authenticity -- it analyzes their distinctive contribution to the German identity discourse between 1918 and 1968. The book shows how these filmmakers devised the landscapes of the German "H...
Katherine Rye Jewell, "Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 09, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutesBands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and their DJs on musical culture since the 1970s was anything but inevitable. As media deregulation and political conflict over obscenity and censorship transformed the business and politics of culture, students and community DJs turned to college radio to defy the mainstream—and they ended up disrupting popular music and commercial radio in the proces...
Yaroslav Trofimov, "Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence" (Penguin, 2023)
January 09, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutesSince February 2022, a string of books have been published about the war in Ukraine but, for the most part, these have been histories and political studies. Only now are the “first drafts of history” from war reporters starting to emerge. Christopher Miller and Andrew Harding published last summer and they will be followed, in late January, by Simon Shuster’s inside account of Volodymyr Zelensky’s war. But, beating Shuster by a fortnight, is Yaroslav Trofimov’s Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Ru...
Ayelet Brinn, "A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press" (NYU Press, 2023)
January 09, 2024 09:00 - 33 minutesA Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Ayelet Brinn offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Jewish newspapers. Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of...
Peter J. Williamson, "Duce: The Contradictions of Power: The Political Leadership of Benito Mussolini" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourEighty years after the fall of Benito Mussolini, controversy remains about what his dictatorship represented. This reflects the different sides to the Duce's leadership: while adept at nurturing and enforcing his personal political power, Mussolini's lack of insight into the requirements of governance prevented him from converting this power into influence to achieve his goals. His efforts to maintain the support of Italy's conservative elites--economic, social and political--also created ten...
Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, "Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History" (Routledge, 2020)
January 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThis original research on the forgotten Libyan genocide specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps (1929-1934) through the oral testimonies of Libyan survivors. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida's book Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History (Routledge, 2020) links the Libyan genocide through cross-cultural and comparative readings to the colonial roots of the Holocaust and genocide studies. Between 1929 and 1934, thousands of Libyans lost their lives, ...
Matthew Carr, "Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain, 1492-1614" (Hurst, 2017)
January 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourA centuries-old story with remarkable contemporary resonance, Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain, 1492-1614 (Hurst, 2017) is celebrated journalist Matthew Carr's riveting and "richly detailed" (Choice) chronicle of what was, by 1614, the largest act of ethnic cleansing in European history. Months after King Philip III of Spain signed an edict in 1609 denouncing the Muslim inhabitants of Spain as heretics, traitors, and apostates, the entire Muslim population of Spain was given three...
Jessica Romney, "Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
January 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourJessica Romney's book Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece (U Michigan Press, 2020) examines how Greek men presented themselves and their social groups to one another. The author examines identity rhetoric in sympotic lyric: how Greek poets constructed images of self for their groups, focusing in turn on the construction of identity in martial-themed poetry, the protection of group identities in the face of political exile, and the negotiation between individual and group as see...
Seth Bernard, "Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy" (Oxford UP, 2018)
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 35 minutesBuilding Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 BCE. As Romans established imperial control over Italy and beyond, the city itself radically transformed from an ambitious central Italian settlement into the capital of the Mediterranean world. Seth Bernard describes this transformation in terms of both new urban architecture, much of it unprecedent...
Bryan Mark Rigg, "The Rabbi Saved by Hitler's Soldiers: Rebbe Joseph Isaac Schneersohn and His Astonishing Rescue" (UP of Kansas, 2016)
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesWhen Hitler invaded Warsaw in the fall of 1939, hundreds of thousands of civilians were trapped in the besieged city. The Rebbe Joseph Schneersohn, the leader of the ultra-orthodox Lubavitcher Jews, was among them. When word of his plight went out, a group of American Jews initiated what would ultimately become one of the strangest—and most miraculous—rescues of World War II. And this is the incredible but true story that Bryan Mark Rigg tells in The Rabbi Saved by Hitler's Soldiers: Rebbe Jo...
Sara Rahnama, "The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria" (Cornell UP, 2023)
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesWhen Algerians of the 1920s and 30s imagined the future of their country, women’s liberation was foundational to their vision. From the first generation of French-educated schoolteachers, to urban domestic workers who challenged spatial and economic divisions, to nationalist journalists pushing back against French colonial claims, Sara Rahnama describes how a range of Algerian actors conceived of women’s rights and responded to new developments in their own country and across the Middle East....
Emma Kuby, "Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourEmma Kuby’s new book, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the fascinating history of the International Commission Against the Concentration Camp Regime (CICRC) established in 1949 by the French intellectual and Nazi camp survivor David Rousset. In the wake of the Second World War, Rousset called upon fellow deportees who had been detained for their political activities to serve as expert witnesses to...
Roland Allen, "The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper" (Profile Books, 2023)
January 06, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWe see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think? In The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Profile Books, 2023), Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of mediaeval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing ...
Klaus Buchenau, "From Grand Estates to Grand Corruption: The Battle Over the Possessions of Prince Albert of Thurn and Taxis in Interwar Yugoslavia" (Brill, 2023)
January 06, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Klaus Buchenau about his new book From Grand Estates to Grand Corruption: The Battle Over the Possessions of Prince Albert of Thurn and Taxis in Interwar Yugoslavia (Brill, 2023). When Yugoslavia was created in 1918, noble landowners still possessed vast parts of its territory especially in the northwestern half of the country which had formerly belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy. With approximately 38,000 hectares, Prince Albert of Thurn and Taxis was the largest private ow...
Elizabeth Eva Leach, "Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders" (Cornell UP, 2023)
January 06, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesHow was music important to medieval society? In Medieval Sex Lives:The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders (Cornell UP, 2023), Prof Elizabeth Eva Leach, a Professor of Music at the University of Oxford explores the history and content of the Douce 308 manuscript to tell the story of the cultural and sexual scripts that framed courtly life in the Medieval era. The book tells the long history of the idea of courtly love, as well as using contemporary theories and cultural prac...
Pavel Khazanov, "The Russia that We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)
January 06, 2024 09:00 - 34 minutesIn 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the tsar of Russia and established a new, communist government, one that viewed the Imperial Russia of old as a righteously vanquished enemy. And yet, as Pavel Khazanov shows in The Russia that We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse (U Wisconsin Press, 2023), after the collapse of Stalinism, a reconfiguration of Imperial Russia slowly began to emerge, recalling the culture of tsarist Russia not as a disgrace but as a glory, a past t...
Colin Jones, "The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris" (Oxford UP, 2021)
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesThe day of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) is universally acknowledged as a major turning-point in the history of the French Revolution. At 12.00 midnight, Maximilien Robespierre, the most prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety which had for more than a year directed the Reign of Terror, was planning to destroy one of the most dangerous plots that the Revolution had faced. By 12.00 midnight at the close of the day, following a day of uncertainty, surprises, upsets and reverses, his wor...
Kate Kirkpatrick, "Becoming Beauvoir: A Life" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesKate Kirkpatrick a lecturer in Religion, Philosophy and Culture at King’s College London and author of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Kirkpatrick has given us a biography that addresses the puzzle and contradictions of the life of the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir drawn from never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how choices shaped her life. Beauvoir, a writer and feminist icon, won prestigious literary prizes and scandalized many ...
Martyn Whittock, "American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America" (Pegasus Books, 2023)
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 31 minutesA vivid and illuminating new history--separate fact from fiction, myth from legend--exploring the early Vikings settlements in North America. Vikings are an enduring subject of fascination. The combination of adventure, mythology, violence, and exploration continues to grip our attention. As a result, for more than a millennium the Vikings have traveled far and wide, not least across the turbulent seas of our minds and imaginations. The geographical reach of the Norse was extraordinary. For c...
Marcy Norton, "The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492" (Harvard UP, 2024)
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024), Dr. Marcy Norton offers a dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world. When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated the...
Susanna Phillips Newbury, "The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesUnderlying every great city is a rich and vibrant culture that shapes the texture of life within. In The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Susanna Phillips Newbury teases out how art and Los Angeles shaped one another’s evolution. She compellingly articulates how together they transformed the Southland, establishing the foundation for its contemporary art infrastructure, and explains how artists came to influence Los Angeles’s ...
Timothy Brook, "The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 39 minutesMing China in 1642 had suffered a series of disasters. Floods, and then drought had destroyed successive rice crops, sending the price of grain to astronomical levels. As one schoolteacher wrote: “There was no rice in the market to buy. Even if a dealer had grain, people passed by without asking the price. The rich were reduced to scrounging for beans or wheat, the poor for chaff or rotting garbage. Being able to buy a few pecks of chaff or bark was ecstasy.” The Ming Dynasty collapsed two ye...
Amanda Kennell, "Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 46 minutesSince the first translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books appeared in Japan in 1899, Alice has found her way into nearly every facet of Japanese life and popular culture. The books have been translated into Japanese more than 500 times, resulting in more editions of these works in Japanese than any other language except English. Generations of Japanese children learned English from textbooks containing Alice excerpts. Japan’s internationally famous fashion vogue, Lolita, merges Alice with F...
Jack Glazier, "Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race" (MSU Press, 2020)
January 04, 2024 04:00 - 1 hourPaul Radin was one of the founding generation of American cultural anthropologists: A student of Franz Boas, and famed ethnographer of the Winnebago. Yet little is known about Radin's life. A leftist who was persecuted by the FBI and who lived for several years outside of the United States, and a bohemian who couldn't keep an academic job, there are many chapters in Radin's life which have not been told. In Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the My...
Katherine M. Marino, "Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2019)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesKatherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) follows the many Latin American and Caribbean women in the first half of the century who not only championed feminism for the continent but also contributed to defining the meaning of international human rights. They drove a transnational movement for women’s suffrage th...
Margaret M. McGuinness, "Katharine Drexel and the Sisters Who Shared Her Vision" (Paulist Press, 2023)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAlthough Katharine Drexel has been the subject of several biographies, they have tended to treat her as a perfect human being whom the Church later transformed into a saint. Katharine Drexel and the Sisters Who Shared Her Vision (Paulist Press, 2023) moves beyond the story of the heiress’s individual life devoted to God and shines a light on the work she did, assisted by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Drexel could have lived comfortably, wealthy and privileged, as a Philadelphia philan...
Noel Malcolm, "Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750" (Oxford UP, 2019)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourSir Noel Malcolm’s captivating new book, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), tells the story of Western European fascination with the Ottoman empire and Islam between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the latter half of the 18th century. This beautifully argued, erudite monograph traces a textured encounter between two civilizational complexes and exposes the dynamic role that the Ottomans played in intra-E...
W. K. Stratton, "The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesOn June 18, 1969, "The Wild Bunch" premiered to critical success. Over the past 50 years it has been rightly recognized as one of the landmark films from the end of the Hollywood studio system. Yet it was developed out of chaos, with a controversial director who had already largely burned his bridges with Hollywood studios. Sam Peckinpah worked for years to film a story that both illustrated the end of the “Old West” and also showed how newer filmmakers wanted to proceed with their newfound i...
William G. Pooley, "Body and Tradition in 19th-Century France: Félix Arnaudin and the Moorlands of Gascony, 1870-1914" (Oxford UP, 2019)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesThe moorlands of Gascony are often considered one of the most dramatic examples of top-down rural modernization in nineteenth-century Europe. From an area of open moors, they were transformed in one generation into the largest man-made forest in Europe. Body and Tradition in Nineteenth-Century France: Félix Arnaudin and the Moorlands of Gascony, 1870-1914 (Oxford University Press) explores how these changes were experienced and negotiated by the people who lived there, drawing on the immense ...
Robert N. Gross, “Public vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America” (Oxford UP, 2018)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThere are numerous political debates about education policy today, but some of the most heated surround vouchers, charter schools, and other questions about public funding and oversight of private schools. Though many of these questions feel new, they, in fact, have a long history. Public vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America (Oxford University Press, 2018) examines that history, tracing early debates about school choice. Robert N. Gross, a history teacher and assistant a...
Chinmay Tumbe, "The Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World" (Harper Collins, 2020)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesOn this episode of the Economic and Business History channel I spoke with Dr. Chinmay Tumbe, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management. He was Alfred D Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar in Business History, Harvard Business School in 2018. Dr, Tumbe has published academic articles in Management and Organizational History and in the Journal of Management History. He has written two books, one in 2018 India Moving: A History of Migration, which talks about...
Roman Politics, Familiar Yet Foreign: A Conversation with Jed Atkins
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesHow are Roman political assumptions similar to versus different from our own? What did the Founding Fathers get right and wrong about the Ancients? How did Rome deal with class conflict? Is America Rome? Joining Madison's Notes to discuss is Duke Classicist Jed Atkins, a specialist in Roman political thought. The conversation convers important differences between Rome's values and ours, such as their emphasis on hierarchy and honor, the impact of great thinkers like Plutarch and Cicero, and m...
Chris S. Duvall, "The African Roots of Marijuana" (Duke UP, 2019)
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesThere's so much discussion in the contemporary United States about marijuana. Debates focus on legalization and medicalization. Usually, Reefer Madness, Harry Anslinger, and race are brought into the conversation. But a big part of the larger marijuana story is missing. In Chris S. Duvall's new book, The African Roots of Marijuana (Duke University Press, 2019), he tells a distinctly non-American story that nevertheless has important lessons for current debates. Duvall helps us understand cann...
Max Deardorff, "A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1570's New Kingdom of Granada (modern Colombia), a new generation of mestizo (half-Spanish, half-indigenous) men sought positions of increasing power in the colony's two largest cities. In response, Spanish nativist factions zealously attacked them as unequal and unqualified, unleashing an intense political battle that lasted almost two decades. At stake was whether membership in the small colonial community and thus access to its most lucrative professions should depend on limpieza de san...
Richard Vague, "A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutesRichard Vague really really cares about private-sector debt. And he thinks you should too. In A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Vague sees the rise and fall of private sector debt as the key factor explaining the cycle of economic crises experienced by developed and major developing economies over the past two centuries. The early stages of a lending cycle look and feel good. Everyone is happy, the lenders think they are s...
Ronen Steinberg, "The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2019)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourHow did the "Reign of Terror" end? In his new book, The Afterlives of Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2019), Ronen Steinberg explores the end of "the Terror" of 1793-94 as a process that included a range of legal, material, ethical, psychological, and emotional challenges. From the vocabulary and stories people used to describe the experience of revolutionary violence, to debates about accountability, redress, and commemorati...
Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 44 minutesIn his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel explores independent India's attempts to feed itself between the 1940s and 1970s. Following the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, hunger and malnutrition remained key issues for India's politicians, planners and citizens as a new nation sought to become self-sufficient in food production. Siegel's book follows debates on land reform, technology and...
John Christopoulos, "Abortion in Early Modern Italy" (Harvard UP, 2021)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesToday we have John Christopoulos, Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, to talk about his new book, Abortion in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2021) In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Ita...
Khurram Hussain, "Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDelighting in Khurram Hussain’s consistently sparkling prose is reason enough to read his new book Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). But there is much more to this splendid book, framed around the profoundly consequential conceptual and political question of can Muslims serve not as friends or foes but as critics of Western modernity. Hussain addresses this question through a close and energetic reading of key selections from the ...
Jelena Subotić, "Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism" (Cornell UP, 2019)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 50 minutesIn her new book Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019) Jelena Subotić asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled―ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated―throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western ...
James O'Toole, "The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good" (HarperBusiness, 2019)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesIs the University of Chicago-blessed, "greed is good" near-term profits approach to business wearing out its welcome? James O'Toole's The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good(HarperBusiness, 2019) is a welcome addition to the current debate about what is the right balance between the near-term profit motive and long-term social goals in running a business. O'Toole, an emeritus professor of business ethics at USC, argues that entrepr...
Adam Mestyan, "Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2023)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesIn Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2023), Adam Mestyan (Duke University) argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism. Rather, they spurred from the process of “recycling empire.” Mestyan shows that in the post–WWI Middle East, Allied Powers officials and ex-Ottoman patricians collaborated to remake imperial institutions, recycling earlie...
Gregg L. Frazer, "God against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy’s Case Against the American Revolution" (UP of Kansas, 2018)
December 31, 2023 09:00 - 36 minutesNot everyone was convinced by the arguments of patriots during the American revolution. Among those who retained some degree of loyalty to the British crown were the majority of the clergy of the Episcopalian Church, as well as a smaller number of clergy from Congregational, Presbyterian and other protestant bodies. In this important new work, Gregg L. Frazer, professor of history and political science at The Master’s University, Santa Clarita, CA, surveys the arguments that loyalist clergy p...
James Keating, "Distant Sisters: Australasian Women and the International Struggle for the Vote, 1880-1914" (Manchester UP, 2020)
December 31, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of women’s electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, James Keating's book Distant Sisters: Australasian Women and the International Struggle for the Vote, 1880-1914 (Manchester UP, 2020) uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising. Conside...
Craig Keener, "Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels" (Eerdmans, 2019)
December 31, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesAre the canonical Gospels historically reliable? The four canonical Gospels are ancient biographies, narratives of Jesus’s life. The authors of these Gospels were intentional in how they handled historical information and sources. Building on recent work in the study of ancient biographies, Craig Keener argues that the writers of the canonical Gospels followed the literary practices of other biographers in their day. In Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels (Ee...
Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (U California Press, 2020)
December 31, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourLaura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from all sort of backgrounds will definitely want to hear more about. Weaving together histories of Black communities (in the US and the Americas more broadly), Native Americans, and multiple Latin Americans countries, Briggs tells us how taking of children has been used as a strategy to terrorize commu...