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
Kelly Ricciardi Colvin, "Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesIn the aftermath of the Second World War, the French government cultivated images of sensual and sophisticated white French women in an attempt to reestablish its global image as a great nation. They promoted the beauty, sexual appeal, and general allure of French women, all while shrinking the boundaries of what was considered beautiful. Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France (University of Toronto Press, 2023) by Dr. Kelly Colvin explores how this elevation of French fem...
Huw Bennett, "Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966–1975" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 26 minutesHuw Bennett is a Reader in International Relations at Cardiff Unviersity. He specializes in strategic studies, the history of war, and intelligence studies, and work on both historical and contemporary issues concerning the use of military power. His research focuses on the experiences of the British Army since 1945, in the contexts of British politics, the Cold War, the end of empire, and the War on Terror. In this interview he discusses his book Uncivil War: The British Army and the Trouble...
Anne E. Linton, "Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourA compelling study of medical and literary imaginations, Anne Linton's Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the complex relationship between modes of seeing, thinking, and writing intersex bodies and lives. In this project, Linton brings a rich archive of medical cases from 1800 to 1902 into dialogue with canonical nineteenth-century authors (Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Emile Zola), as well as an impressive ran...
David M. Freidenreich, "Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy" (U California Press, 2023)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesUncovering the hidden history of Islamophobia and its surprising connections to the long-standing hatred of Jews. Hatred of Jews and hatred of Muslims have been intertwined in Christian thought since the rise of Islam. In Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy (U California Press, 2023), David M. Freidenreich explores the history of this complex, perplexing, and emotionally fraught phenomenon. He makes the compelling case that, then and now, hate-mongers target "them" in a...
Brian Jeffrey Maxson, "Early Modern Europe: Facts and Fictions" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesToday I talked to Brian Maxson about his new book Early Modern Europe: Facts and Fictions (Bloomsbury, 2023). Through the exploration of nine common myths about the history and culture of early modern Europe, roughly 1350-1700, this book uses common assumptions to introduce newcomers to the period and its key figures, developments, and events. Many myths about early modern Europe originated in the 19th and 20th centuries and continue to appear today across popular media. In recent years, suc...
Helen Louise Cowie, "Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesAnimal products were used extensively in nineteenth-century Britain. A middle-class Victorian woman might wear a dress made of alpaca wool, drape herself in a sealskin jacket, brush her hair with a tortoiseshell comb, and sport feathers in her hat. She might entertain her friends by playing a piano with ivory keys or own a parrot or monkey as a living fashion accessory. In Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Helen Cowie examines ...
Magda Stroińska, "My Life in Propaganda: A Memoir about Language and Totalitarian Regimes" (Durvile, 2023)
December 21, 2023 05:00 - 1 hourMy Life in Propaganda: A Memoir about Language and Totalitarian Regimes (Durvile, 2023) is Magda Stroińska’s personal account of growing up with communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She looks at the influence of her family history that contradicted what she was taught at school; the cognitive and emotional effects of compulsory school readings; socialist realist art and film; and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and their role in shaping her generation’s collective view of the world....
Vineeta Sinha. "Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia" (Berghahn Books, 2023)
December 20, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesThe notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Vineeta Sinha's Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia (Berghahn Books, 2023) critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-b...
Pardis Mahdavi, "Hyphen" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
December 20, 2023 09:00 - 31 minutesTo hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts. Hyphen (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Dr. Pardis Mahdavi is part of the Object Lessons series and follows the story of the hyphen from antiquity-"Hyphen” is derived from an ancient Greek word meaning “to tie together” -to the present, but also uncovers the politics of the hyphen and the role i...
David Craig, "Apocalypse Television: How The Day After Helped Save the World" (Applause Books, 2023)
December 20, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesOn November 20, 1983, a three-hour made-for-TV movie The Day After premiered on ABC. Set in the heartland of Lawrence, Kansas, the film depicted the events before, during, and after a Soviet nuclear attack with vivid scenes of the post-apocalyptic hellscape that would follow. The film was viewed by over 100 million Americans and remains the highest rated TV movie in history. After the premiere, ABC News aired an episode of Viewpoint, a live special featuring some of the most prominent public ...
Katlyn Marie Carter, "Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions" (Yale UP, 2023)
December 19, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesKatlyn Marie Carter, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale UP, 2023) examines how debates over secrecy and transparency in politics during the eighteenth century shaped modern democracy. Does democracy die in darkness, as the saying suggests? This book reveals that modern democracy was born in secrecy, despite the widespread conviction that transparency was its very essence. In the years preceding the American and French revolutions, state secrecy cam...
António Costa Pinto, "An Authoritarian Third Way in the Era of Fascism: Diffusion, Models and Interactions in Europe and Latin America" (Routledge, 2021)
December 19, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAntónio Costa Pinto's book An Authoritarian Third Way in the Era of Fascism: Diffusion, Models and Interactions in Europe and Latin America (Routledge, 2021) takes a transnational and comparative approach that analyses the process of diffusion of a third way in selected transitions to authoritarianism in Europe and Latin America. When looking at the authoritarian wave of the 1930s, it is not difficult to see how some regimes appeared to offer an authoritarian third way somewhere between demo...
Wayne Soon, "Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History" (Stanford UP, 2020)
December 19, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Wayne Soon about his book Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford UP, 2020). In 1938, one year into the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese military found itself in dire medical straits. Soldiers were suffering from deadly illnesses, and were unable to receive blood transfusions for their wounds. The urgent need for medical assistance prompted an unprecedented flowering of scientific knowledge in China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. Wayne Soon...
Sara Chatfield, "In Her Own Name: The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage" (Columbia UP, 2023)
December 18, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesWe often narrate the history of women’s rights in the United States by focusing on the fight for suffrage. Yet starting as early as 1835, states expanded married women’s economic rights. How were these statutes passed at a time when women’s political power was severely constrained, including no right to vote in most states? With limited national coordination? In In Her Own Name: The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage (Columbia UP, 2023), Dr. Sara Chatfield argues that married women’s...
Jack D. Noe, "Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South" (LSU Press, 2021)
December 18, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutesExamining identity and nationalism in the Reconstruction-era South, Jack Noe’s Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South (Louisiana State University Press, 2021) investigates debates concerning the One Hundredth Anniversary of American Independence. This commemoration, which came only seven years after the conclusion of the Civil War, provided a crucible for whites, Blacks, northerners, and southerners to reflect on their identity as Ame...
Michelle R. Scott, "T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners' Booking Association in Jazz-Age America" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
December 18, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesBlack vaudevillians and entertainers joked that T.O.B.A. stood for "tough on black artists." But the Theater Owner's Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) played a foundational role in the African American entertainment industry. T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners’ Booking Association in Jazz-Age America by Michelle R. Scott (University of Illinois Press, 2023) examines this circuit of vaudeville theaters active between 1920 and 1930 which booked blues singers, comedians, dancers...
Yaron Eliav, "A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse: Cultural Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean" (Princeton UP, 2023)
December 17, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourPublic bathhouses embodied the Roman way of life, from food and fashion to sculpture and sports. The most popular institution of the ancient Mediterranean world, the baths drew people of all backgrounds. They were places suffused with nudity, sex, and magic. A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse: Cultural Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean (Princeton UP, 2023) reveals how Jews navigated this space with ease and confidence, engaging with Roman bath culture rather than avoiding it. In this landmar...
Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry White, "Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture" (U California Press, 2023)
December 17, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhat we learn when an anthropologist and a historian talk about food. From the origins of agriculture to contemporary debates over culinary authenticity, Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture (U California Press, 2023) introduces readers to world food history and food anthropology. Through engaging stories and historical deep dives, Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White offer new ways to understand food in relation to its natural and cultural histories and the social rul...
Jackson Lears, "Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street" (FSG, 2023)
December 17, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn this interview the distinguished historian Jackson Lears talks about his latest book, Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street (FSG, 2023), which explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual’s spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosi...
Katherine D. Von Schaik, "How to Be Healthy: An Ancient Guide to Wellness" (Galen) (Princeton UP, 2024)
December 17, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutesThe second-century Greek physician Galen—the most famous doctor in antiquity after Hippocrates—is a central figure in Western medicine. A talented doctor, surgeon, writer, philosopher, teacher, pharmacologist, and inventor, Galen attended the court of Marcus Aurelius, living through outbreaks of plague (likely smallpox) that devastated the Roman Empire. He also served as physician for professional gladiators, boasting that only two fighters died during his first year (his predecessor had lost...
Mario Baghos, "From the Ancient Near East to Christian Byzantium: Kings, Symbols, and Cities" (Cambridge Scholars, 2021)
December 16, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourMario Baghos's book From the Ancient Near East to Christian Byzantium: Kings, Symbols, and Cities (Cambridge Scholars, 2021) combines concepts from the history of religions with Byzantine studies in its assessments of kings, symbols, and cities in a diachronic and cross-cultural analysis. The work attests, firstly, that the symbolic art and architecture of ancient cities—commissioned by their monarchs expressing their relationship with their gods—show us that religiosity was inherent to such ...
Simone Gigliotti, "Restless Archive: The Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced" (Indiana UP, 2023)
December 16, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesThe global refugee, the ship passenger, the displaced person. How did their homeseeking routes and visual motifs intersect and diverge in the early Holocaust film archive? Simone Gigliotti's Restless Archive: The Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced tracks the footsteps and routes of predominantly Jewish refugees and postwar displaced persons in what I call a “restless archive” of photographic, cinematographic and visual material that was created and re-used between 1933 and 1949. The hi...
Randall Hansen, "War, Work, and Want: How the OPEC Oil Crisis Caused Mass Migration and Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2023)
December 16, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesThe oil shock of 1973 changed everything. It brought the golden age of American and European economic growth to an end; it destabilized Middle Eastern politics; and it set in train processes that led to over one hundred million unexpected—and unwanted—immigrants. In War, Work, and Want: How the OPEC Oil Crisis Caused Mass Migration and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Randall Hansen asks why, against all expectations, global migration tripled after 1970. The answer, he argues, ...
The Future of Global Economic Governance: A Discussion with Jamie Martin
December 16, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesWith increasing talk of de-dollarization and the Gulf attempts to get more influence in the IMF it’s a good time to talk about the world’s international financial institutions – and their role globalization and its future. Listen to Owen Bennett-Jones in conversation with Jamie Martin author of The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard UP, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he h...
Sisterhood
December 16, 2023 09:00 - 20 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Katherine Turk tells us about Sisterhood, a familial metaphor used to evoke gendered solidarity in women’s movement of the mid-sixties and seventies, and a utopian ideal of equality within the human family. It’s a universalizing but aspirational concept that helped feminists build a political coalition. Our conversation is based upon Katherine’s new book about the National Organization of Women: The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transfo...
Ronald C. White, "On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain" (Random House, 2023)
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourBefore 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North’s greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed t...
Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov, "Seven Myths of the Russian Revolution" (Hackett, 2023)
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour"This fascinating volume is a major contribution to our understanding of the Russian Revolution, from World War I to consolidation of the Bolshevik regime. The seven myths include the exaggeration of Rasputin's influence; a purported conspiracy behind the February Revolution; the treasonous Bolshevik dependence on German support; the multiple Anastasia pretenders to the royal inheritance; the antisemitic claims about 'Judeo-Bolsheviks'; distortions about America’s intervention in the civil wa...
Sally Frances Low, "Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French" (NUS Press, 2023)
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesIn 1863 the French established a protectorate over the kingdom of Cambodia. The protectorate, along with Vietnam and Laos, later became part of the colonial state of French Indochina. Part of the French ‘civilizing mission’ in Cambodia involved reforming Cambodian law and legal processes. Sally Low’s pioneering study, Colonial Law Making: Cambodia under the French (NUS Press, 2023), tells the story of the encounter between what she calls two different legal and social ‘cosmologies’: Cambodia...
Gary J. Bass, "Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia" (Knopf, 2023)
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 31 minutesJudgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Knopf, 2023), a book ten years in the making, is the definitive account of the postwar trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals, and the impact it had on the modern history of Asia. Written by Gary Bass, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, the book shines a much-needed spotlight on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the criminal process historically overshadowed by...
Kawi Culture: Exploring Indonesia’s Classical Civilisation
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutesHave you ever heard of Kawi? Much of what is considered “classical” in Indonesian history, such as the Borobudur temple complex or the kingdom of Majapahit, is a product of Kawi Culture. In fact, Indonesian society emerged from the ancient traditions of Kawi Culture, which stretch back over a thousand years. The symbols and ideas of Kawi Culture continue to define Indonesian identity, such as in Javanese wayang, Balinese temples, and even the national motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, which is quot...
Peter Richardson, "Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo" (U California Press, 2022)
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourHunter S. Thompson was never a hippie, but his writing nonetheless helped define the counterculture and the San Francisco scene of the 1960s and early 1970s. In Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo (U California Press, 2022), literary scholar and California historian Peter Richardson examines Thompson less as a cultural figure than as a member of a literary movement. Richardson explores the roots of Thompson's "gonzo journalism" writing style and explains his influen...
Peter Brown, "Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History" (Princeton UP, 2023)
December 14, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOver the past seven decades, Peter Brown has transformed our collective understanding of the late Roman Empire and the European Middle Ages alike, establishing Late Antiquity (ca. 250-800 CE) as a distinctive era of creative religious, social, and intellectual ferment. This was the time of the prophet Muhammad, of Augustine of Hippo, of Byzantium’s heyday. Peter Brown published his revolutionary life-and-times study of Augustine while at Oxford, in the 1960s, and a further dozen studies have ...
Hugo Wong, "America's Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream" (Oxford UP, 2023)
December 14, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutesLike countless other migrants from China, Hugo Wong’s great-grandfathers–Wong Foon Chuck and Leung Hing–travel across the Pacific to make a life for themselves in San Francisco. Unlike many of their peers, they don’t stay, instead traveling south, to Mexico–in part to escape growing anti-Chinese prejudice in the United States. They thrive, at least initially, in Mexico, as Hugo explains in his book America's Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream (Hurst, 2023). They assimil...
Pankaj Jain, "Modern Jainism: A Historical Approach" (Springer, 2023)
December 14, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesPankaj Jain's book Modern Jainism: A Historical Approach (Springer, 2023) presents a substantive yet accessible introduction to the modern thought of Jainism. It examines the life and thought of some of the most influential 19th- and 20th-century Jain ascetic leaders that remain little known in the Western world. The book's first part provides a detailed philosophical overview of Jain thought based on the translation of a seminal Hindi text Jain Darshan. The second part introduces eight Jain ...
Jonathan Sumption, "Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War, Vol. 5" (Faber & Faber, 2023)
December 14, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesTriumph and Illusion (Faber & Faber, 2023) is the final volume of Jonathan Sumption's epic history of the Hundred Years War. It tells the story of the collapse of the English dream of conquest from the opening years of the reign of Henry VI, when the battles of Cravant and Verneuil consolidated their control of most of northern France, until the loss of all their continental dominions except Calais thirty years later. This sudden reversal of fortune was a seminal event in the history of the t...
Kathy Stuart, "Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
December 13, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourSuicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. In Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin, and Salvation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unin...
David Carey, Jr., "Health in the Highlands: Indigenous Healing and Scientific Medicine in Guatemala and Ecuador" (U California Press, 2023)
December 13, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesHealth in the Highlands: Indigenous Healing and Scientific Medicine in Guatemala and Ecuador (University of California Press, 2023) explores how, in the early to mid-twentieth century, the governments of Ecuador and Guatemala sought to expand Western medicine within their countries, with the goals of addressing endemic diseases and improving infant and maternal health. These efforts often clashed with indigenous medical practices, particularly in the rural highlands. Drawing on extensive, ori...
David Steele, "It Was Always a Choice: Picking Up the Baton of Athlete Activism" (Temple UP, 2022)
December 12, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday we are joined by the sports journalist David Steele, who has written for the Sporting News, AOL, the Baltimore Sun and the San Francisco Chronicle, and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, the Association of Black Media Workers, the Associated Press Sports Editors, and the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of It Was Always a Choice: Picking up the Baton of Athlete Activism (Temple UP, 2022). In our conversation, we discuss the beginning...
Rob Harvilla, "60 Songs That Explain The 90s" (Twelve, 2023)
December 12, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesA companion to the #1 music podcast on Spotify, this book takes listeners through the greatest hits that define a weirdly undefinable decade. The 1990s were a chaotic and gritty and utterly magical time for music, a confounding barrage of genres and lifestyles and superstars, from grunge to hip-hop, from sumptuous R&B to rambunctious ska-punk, from Axl to Kurt to Missy to Santana to Tupac to Britney. In 60 Songs That Explain The 90s (Twelve, 2023), Ringer music critic Rob Harvilla reimagines ...
Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski, "The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family and Kingdom" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
December 12, 2023 05:00 - 1 hourIn the current context, where Vladimir Putin justifies his war against Ukraine by insisting on an inevitable, unbroken teleology that binds Kyiv to Moscow, he need to critically reexamine such interpretations is painfully evident. Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski's book The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family and Kingdom (Reaktion Books, 2023) takes a brave and important step in that direction by charting a history of Kyivan Rus’ through the framework of a history of families. T...
Alexandra Kitty, "A Different Track: Hospital Trains of the Second World War" (Heritage House, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 29 minutesRailroads played an integral role in the Second World War. Trains brought food, munitions, and essential supplies. They transported troops. They were a means of escape for those fleeing persecution. At the same, they were used to transport innocent people to their deaths. Yet there was one kind of train that improved the chances of survival every time they rolled through the battle-worn towns and cities of the European theatre of war. Hospital trains were not a new concept in the Second World...
Ervin Malakaj, "Anders als Die Andern" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesReleased in 1919, "Anders als die Andern" (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film’s moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today. Directed by Richard Oswald and co-written by Oswald and the renowned sexol...
Everyday Life Behind the Berlin Wall
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutesIn this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews historian and journalist Katja Hoyer about her book Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany (Basic Books, 2023). The conversation begins with a discussion of the personal reasons that the author, herself born in the GDR, wanted to cover the untold stories of her native country – which can no longer be found on a map. Hoyer also discusses the rationale behind the relative gender parity that existed in the GDR as ...
Martin C. Dean, "Investigating Babyn Yar: Shadows from the Valley of Death" (Lexington Books, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 36 minutesInvestigating Babyn Yar: Shadows from the Valley of Death (Lexington Books, 2023) pieces together the story of the destruction of Kyiv's Jews using history's shattered fragments. Martin Dean traces their journey out of the city, using discarded clothing and distinctive terrain as a trail of breadcrumbs to identify the killing site in the ravine. Shadowy figures in photographs and escape stories from the mass grave reveal the suffering of many that is documented by the survival of just a few. ...
Tristan G. Brown, "Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesWelcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and I am speaking today to Prof. Tristan Brown about his book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton UP, 2023). Brown’s book considers fengshui, that is, the knowledge of orienting structures, such as graves and houses, in accordance with well-established cosmological principles, as an administrative technology and language of power that was intrinsic to governance ...
Paolo Caroli, "Transitional Justice in Italy and the Crimes of Fascism and Nazism" (Routledge, 2022)
December 11, 2023 05:00 - 1 hourPaolo Caroli's book Transitional Justice in Italy and the Crimes of Fascism and Nazism (Routledge, 2022) presents a comprehensive analysis of the Italian experience of transitional justice examining how the crimes of Fascism and World War II have been dealt with from a comparative perspective. Applying an interdisciplinary and comparative methodology, the book offers a detailed reconstruction of the prosecution of the crimes of Fascism and the Italian Social Republic as well as crimes committ...
Stephen Legg, "Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesStephen Legg's Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s–60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled t...
Matthew Dennis, "American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 54 minutesThe gold epaulettes that George Washington wore into battle. A Union soldier's bloody shirt in the wake of the Civil War. A crushed wristwatch after the 9/11 attacks. The bullet-riddled door of the Pulse nightclub. Volatile and shape-shifting, relics have long played a role in memorializing the American past, acting as physical reminders of hard-won battles, mass tragedies, and political triumphs. Surveying the expanse of U.S. history, American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory (U Mass...
Paul Crosthwaite et al., "Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesWho hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and otherwise, have guaranteed that they alone can illuminate the golden pathway to prosperity—despite strong evidence to the contrary. In fact, too often, they are singing a siren song of devastation. And yet we keep listening. Invested: Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds (U Chicago Press, 2022...
Genealogies of Modernity Episode 6: A Medieval Anti-Racist
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutesWhat if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adornol, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the presence of slavery. His intellectual rebellion spurred slavery’s apologists to more strident and sinister modes of de...