New Books in History
8,133 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★ - 190 ratingsInterviews with Historians about their New Books
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Episodes
Camillo Leonardi, "Speculum Lapidum: A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones" (Penn State UP, 2023)
January 23, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesFirst published in Venice in 1502, Camillo Leonardi’s Speculum Lapidum is an encyclopedic summary of all classical and medieval sources of lithotherapy. Today Jana Byars talks to Liliana Leopardi about her new translation, Speculum Lapidum: A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones (Penn State University Press, 2023). In early modern Europe precious and semiprecious stones were valued not only for their beauty and rarity but also for their medical and magical properties. L...
Paul D. Barclay, "Kondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan's Bloodiest Uprising" (Eastbridge Books, 2023)
January 22, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesKondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan's Bloodiest Uprising (Eastbridge Books, 2023) is a gripping and revealing account of the colonial Japanese era in Taiwan, focusing on the Musha Rebellion and its brutal suppression by the Japanese military. The book presents the translated account of Kondō Katsusaburō, a Japanese adventurer who married into an indigenous Taiwanese family. Kondō's journals offer an intimate and personal perspective on the events, though they can ...
Ian MacAllen, "Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
January 22, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesIn Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Ian MacAllen traces the evolution of traditional Italian-American cuisine, often referred to as “red sauce Italian,” from its origins in Italy to its transformation in America into a new, distinct cuisine. It is a fascinating social and culinary history exploring the integration of red sauce food into mainstream America alongside the blending of Italian immigrant otherness into a national American identity. The story...
Catherine Powell-Warren, "Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
January 22, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesJana Byars speaks with Catherine Powell-Warren about Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). The conversation begins by examining the ways modern scholars are radically changing our understanding of the position of early modern women one monograph at a time before dialing in on a book that does just that. At once collector, botanist, reader, artist, and patron, Agnes Bloc...
Nicholas Morton, "The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187" (Oxford UP, 2020)
January 22, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourNicholas Morton’s The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187 (Oxford UP, 2020) explores the military history of the medieval Near East, piecing together the fault-lines of conflict which entangled this much-contested region. This was an area where ethnic, religious, dynastic, and commercial interests collided and the causes of war could be numerous. Conflicts persisted for decades and were fought out between many groups including Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, an...
Cassander L. Smith, "Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic" (LSU Press, 2023)
January 21, 2024 09:00 - 40 minutesRace and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic (LSU Press, 2023) by Dr. Cassander L. Smith examines the means through which people of African descent embodied tenets of respectability as a coping strategy to navigate enslavement and racial oppression in the early Black Atlantic world. The term “respectability politics” refers to the way members of a minoritized population adopt the customs and manners of a dominant culture in order to gain visibility and combat negative stereotypes about ...
Andrekos Varnava, "Assassination in Colonial Cyprus in 1934 and the Origins of EOKA" (Anthem Press, 2021)
January 21, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAndrekos Varnava's book Assassination in Colonial Cyprus in 1934 and the Origins of EOKA (Anthem Press, 2021) explores the assassination of Antonios Triantafyllides, a leading Cypriot lawyer and politician, in British colonial Cyprus in January 1934. This event has been the infamous subject of rumours since its occurrence and a taboo subject for Cypriot society and historians alike, as the event has been silenced or dismissed. This book explores the assassination in its broadest possible cont...
Jakob Norberg, "The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
January 21, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourJacob and Wilhelm Grimm are probably history’s most famous folklorists. Their collection of folk tales – the Children’s and Household Tales – is one of the world’s most translated literary works. Living in a time of upheaval and war, the Grimm brothers were also passionate German nationalists. They insisted that Germans must reject alien regimes and only accept rulers who spoke their language and cherished their traditions. The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge U...
Chelsea Schields, "Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean" (U California Press, 2023)
January 21, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesChelsea Schields's book Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (U California Press, 2023) reveals how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world's largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reprodu...
Brian Gastle et al., "The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis" (Medieval Institute Press, 2023)
January 21, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesJohn Gower’s "Confessio Amantis" ("The Lover’s Confession") is one of the most important English works of the fourteenth century. Within its frame of the lovesick lover’s confession are well over a hundred stories, mainly derived from classical mythology, the Bible, and history which exemplify the Middle Ages. Echoing the octosyllabic line of the original, The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Medieval Institute Press, 2023) is the first translation of the e...
Jessica Goethals, "Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe Roman singer, courtesan, and writer Margherita Costa won prominence and fame across the courts of Italy and France during the mid-seventeenth century. She secured a steady stream of elite patrons – including popes, queens, grand dukes, and influential cardinals – while male poets and librettists wrote celebratory poetry on her behalf. In addition to her appearances as a soprano on the opera stage, Costa published a remarkable fourteen full-length texts across an expanse of genres: burlesq...
Hwisang Cho, "The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea" (U Washington Press, 2020)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesThe invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within families, and written culture created room for appropriation and subversion by those who joined epistolary practices. Focusing on the ways that written ...
The Future of Images of Human Evolution
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 35 minutesWe are all familiar with the “march of progress” image - the representation of evolution that depicts a series of apelike creatures becoming progressively taller and more erect before finally reaching the upright human form. It’s a powerful image. In his book Monkey to Man: The Evolution of the March of Progress Image (Yale UP, 2024), Professor Gowan Dawson examines its origins and its influence on the public understanding of evolution. Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. O...
Jane Ohlmeyer, "Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourEmpire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history of the world for the last two millennia. It is nation states that are the blip on the historical horizon. Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jane Ohlmeyer re-examines empire as process—and Ireland's role in it—through the lens of early modernity. It covers the two hundred years, between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth ce...
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesToday we are joined by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Professor of History at The New School, and author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2023). In our conversation, we discussed the beginnings of fitness in the United States, how fitness both offered the state a way to shape bodies and liberatory possibilities for counter-cultural communities, and the future of exercise in a post-covid world. In Fit Nation, Petrzela investigates the ...
Lewis Wade, "Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire Under Louis XIV" (Boydell Press, 2023)
January 19, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesPrivilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire Under Louis XIV (Boydell Press, 2023) closely analyses the rise and fall of Louis XIV's marine insurance institutions in Paris, which were central to the French monarchy's efforts to stimulate commerce, colonial enterprise and economic growth. These institutions were the projects of two leading ministers, Jean-Baptiste Colbert and his son, the Marquis de Seignelay. While both men recognised that m...
Robert C. Post, "The Taft Court (10): Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921–1930" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
January 19, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourRobert C. Post's book The Taft Court (10): Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921–1930 (Cambridge UP, 2023) offers the definitive history of the Supreme Court from 1921 to 1930 when William Howard Taft was Chief Justice. Using untapped archival material, Robert C. Post engagingly recounts the ambivalent effort to create a modern American administrative state out of the institutional innovations of World War I. He shows how the Court sought to establish authoritative forms of constitutional int...
Bradley R. Clampitt, "Lost Causes: Confederate Demobilization and the Making of Veteran Identity" (LSU Press, 2022)
January 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourLost Causes: Confederate Demobilization and the Making of Veteran Identity (LSU Press, 2022) by Dr. Bradley R. Clampitt is a groundbreaking analysis of Confederate demobilisation. The book examines the state of mind of Confederate soldiers in the immediate aftermath of war. Having survived severe psychological as well as physical trauma, they now faced the unknown as they headed back home in defeat. Lost Causes analyses the interlude between soldier and veteran, suggesting that defeat and dem...
Patricia Strach and Kathleen S. Sullivan, "The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890–1929" (Cornell UP, 2023)
January 18, 2024 09:00 - 45 minutesPolitical Scientists Patricia Strach (The University at Albany, State University of New York) and Kathleen S. Sullivan (Ohio University) have written a fascinating and important exploration of trash. More precisely, this is a complex examination and analysis of the development of our municipal sanitation processes and structures, highlighting intersecting policy areas, urban and local politics, and racial, gender, and class politics. The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to C...
Scott Gac, "Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
January 18, 2024 09:00 - 39 minutesScott Gac's Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates one of history's most violent undertakings: The United States of America. People the world over consider violence in the United States as measurably different than that which troubles the rest of the globe, citing reasons including gun culture, the American West, Hollywood, the death penalty, economic inequality, rampant individualism, and more. This compelling examination of American violence expl...
Yitzhak Teutsch, "The Cyprus Detention Camps: The Essential Research Guide" (Cambridge Scholars, 2019)
January 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourBeginning in August 1946, stateless and visaless Jews, most of them survivors of the Nazi death camps, who sought to immigrate to the Land of Israel were intercepted by the Royal Navy and deported to the nearby island of Cyprus, where they were detained in camps surrounded by barbed wire. Despite occupying a dramatic and fateful position in modern history, this saga has remained largely inaccessible due to the widespread dispersal of the primary sources and the linguistic difficulties present...
Sujin Lee, "Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
January 17, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesIn 2007, Japan’s health minister referred to women ages 15-50 as “birthing machines.” The context was a speech about Japan’s declining birthrate and projected population shrinkage. As Sujin Lee shows in Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan (Stanford UP, 2023), neither population anxieties nor the idea of women as childbearing devices whose wombs were the property of the state are new. However, when the “population problem” became a public preoccupation for po...
On Henry Einspruch's 1941 Yiddish Translation of the Christian Bible
January 17, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesToday we are going to explore a peculiar volume in the history of Yiddish literature, the Yiddish translation of the Christian bible written by Khaim Yekhiel, “Henry,” Einspruch, titled Der Bris Ḥadoshe, first published in Baltimore in 1941. The saga of Einspruch’s translation of the Christian bible is the subject of a new Yiddish drama, “The Gospel According to Chaim,” written by Mikhl Yashinsky, and recently produced by the New Yiddish Rep theater company in New York. Interviewee: Professor...
Aimee Loiselle, "Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 17, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesIn the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources--union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories-...
Geoffrey Levin, "Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978" (Yale UP, 2023)
January 16, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAmerican Jews began debating Palestinian rights issues even before Israel’s founding in 1948. Geoffrey Levin recovers the voices of American Jews who, in the early decades of Israel’s existence, called for an honest reckoning with the moral and political plight of Palestinians. These now‑forgotten voices, which include an aid‑worker‑turned‑academic with Palestinian Sephardic roots, a former Yiddish journalist, anti‑Zionist Reform rabbis, and young left‑wing Zionist activists, felt drawn to su...
Emma Gleadhill, "Taking Travel Home: The Souvenir Culture of British Women Tourists, 1750-1830" (Manchester UP, 2022)
January 16, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn the late eighteenth-century, elite British women had an unprecedented opportunity to travel. Taking travel home uncovers the souvenir culture these women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship and science. Key characters include forty-three-year-old Hester Piozzi (Thrale), who honeymooned in Italy; thirty-one-year-old Anna Miller, who accompanied her husband on a Grand Tour; Dorothy Richards...
Karen C. Pinto, "Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
January 16, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesThe history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and...
Christopher Corker, "The Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry, 1900-1930" (U of York, 2016)
January 16, 2024 09:00 - 42 minutesChristopher Corker's The Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry, 1900-1930 (U of York, 2016) focuses on four in-depth case studies of John Brown, Cammell-Laird, Thomas Firth and Hadfields to examine the business and technology of the industry. It builds on the work of Tweedale and Trebilcock on Sheffield and armaments, and advances the argument that during the period of study from 1900 to 1930, the city was one of the most important centres for armaments research and prod...
Alexandra Filindra, "Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
January 15, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesThe United States has more guns than people and more gun violence than any Western democracy. Scholars in diverse fields interrogate why 21st century Americans support gun ownership and valorize vigilantism even as they fear gun violence. Many question how the NRA – National Rifle Association – has successfully lobbied for radical gun laws that most Americans don’t support. In Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Alexandra...
Miles P. Grier, "Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
January 15, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn his new book Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery (University of Virginia Press, 2023), Miles P. Grier argues that blackness in Othello and the texts that it influenced should be understood as deeply material, transferable, and unstable. The defining of alphanumerical and dramatic characters, while represented as settled, was anything but. As Miles writes in the book, “Before the racial categories of high scientific racism were elaborated in the late eighteen...
Patricio Simonetto, "A Body of One's Own: A Trans History of Argentina" (U Texas Press, 2024)
January 15, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesAs a trans history of Argentina, a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives, A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina (University of Texas Press, 2024) places the histories of trans bodies at the core of modern Argentinian history. Dr. Patricio Simonetto documents the lives of people who crossed the boundaries of gender from the early twentieth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research in public and community-base...
Uri Kaufman, "Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)
January 15, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesOctober 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, a conflict that shaped the modern Middle East. The War was a trauma for Israel, a dangerous superpower showdown, and, following the oil embargo, a pivotal reordering of the global economic order. The Jewish State came shockingly close to defeat. A panicky cabinet meeting debated the use of nuclear weapons. After the war, Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in disgrace, and a 9/11-style commission investigated the "debacle." But, ar...
Rishad Choudhury, "Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
January 14, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of imperial connections across the Indian Ocean from 1739 to 1857, a period that witnessed the decline and collapse of Mughal rule and the consolidation of British colonialism in South Asia. In this highly original and comprehensive study, he reveals how the hajj pilgrimage significantly transformed Muslim political culture and colonial attitudes ...
James W. Cortada, "Inside IBM: Lessons of a Corporate Culture in Action" (Columbia Business School, 2023)
January 14, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIBM was the world's leading provider of information technologies for much of the twentieth century. What made it so successful for such a long time, and what lessons can this iconic corporation teach present-day enterprises? James W. Cortada--a business historian who worked at IBM for many years--pinpoints the crucial role of IBM's corporate culture. He provides an inside look at how this culture emerged and evolved over the course of nearly a century, bringing together the perspectives of em...
Elisabeth Gernerd, "The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear and Accessories in the Late 18th-Century Atlantic World" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
January 14, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFrom rumps and stays to muffs and handkerchiefs, underwear and accessories were critical components of the 18th-century woman's wardrobe. They not only created her shape, but expressed her character, sociability, fashionability, and even political allegiances. These so-called ephemeral flights of fashion were not peripheral and supplementary, but highly charged artefacts, acting as cultural currency in contemporary society. The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear and Accessories in the Late 18th-C...
Rich Cohen, "When the Game Was War: The NBA's Greatest Season" (Random House, 2023)
January 13, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFour historic teams. Four legendary players. One unforgettable season. The 1980s were a transformative decade for the NBA. Since its founding in 1946, the league had evolved from a bruising, earthbound game of mostly nameless, underpaid players to one in which athletes became household names for their thrilling, physics-defying play. The 1987–88 season was the peak of that golden era, a year of incredible drama that featured a pantheon of superstars in their prime—the most future Hall of Fame...
Emily Brooks, "Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 13, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThroughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform. La Guardia's approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement, including "broken windows" theory and "stop and frisk" policy. Police officers worked to preserve urban order by controlling vice, including juve...
Aviva Ben-Ur and Wim Klooster eds., "Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World" (Cornell UP, 2024)
January 13, 2024 09:00 - 45 minutesAviva Ben-Ur and Wim Klooster's edited volume Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World (Cornell UP, 2024) represents the first collective attempt to reframe the study of colonial and early American Jewry within the context of Atlantic History. From roughly 1500 to 1830, the Atlantic World was a tightly intertwined swathe of global powers that included Europe, Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean. How, when, and where do Jews figure in this important chapter of history? This ...
Jacob L. Wright, "Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
January 13, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesWhy did no other ancient society produce something like the Bible? That a tiny, out of the way community could have created a literary corpus so determinative for peoples across the globe seems improbable. For Jacob Wright, the Bible is not only a testimony of survival, but also an unparalleled achievement in human history. Forged after Babylon's devastation of Jerusalem, it makes not victory but total humiliation the foundation of a new idea of belonging. Lamenting the destruction of their h...
Stéphane Jettot, "Selling Ancestry: Family Directories and the Commodification of Genealogy in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 13, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesOften cited but rarely studied in their own right, family directories allow a reconsideration of how ancestry and genealogy became an object of widespread commercialization across the eighteenth century. These directories replaced the expensive, locally-produced, early modern artefacts (tombs, windowpanes, illuminated pedigrees), and began to reach a wide audience of readers in the British Isles and the colonies. In Selling Ancestry: Family Directories and the Commodification of Genealogy in...
Jennifer V. Evans, "The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism" (Duke UP, 2023)
January 12, 2024 09:00 - 34 minutesIn The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (Duke UP, 2023), Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a practice of queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity. Drawing on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and trans studies, Evans points out that although many rights for LGBTQI people have been gained in Germany, those rights have not been enjoyed equally. There remain fundamental struggles arou...
Matthew Romaniello, "Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
January 12, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn his new book Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge University Press), Matthew Romaniello examines the workings of the British Russia Company and the commercial entanglements of the British and Russian empires in the long eighteenth century. This innovative and highly readable monograph challenges the long-held views of Russian economic backwardness in the early modern period and stresses the importance of personal histories and individual agency ...
Hajar Yazdiha, "The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement" (Princeton UP, 2023)
January 12, 2024 09:00 - 30 minutesIn the post-civil rights era, wide-ranging groups have made civil rights claims that echo those made by Black civil rights activists of the 1960s, from people with disabilities to women's rights activists and LGBTQ coalitions. Increasingly since the 1980s, white, right-wing social movements, from family values coalitions to the alt-right, now claim the collective memory of civil rights to portray themselves as the newly oppressed minorities. The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Tr...
Judith Surkis, "Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930" (Cornell UP, 2019)
January 12, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourJudith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the intersection of colonialism, law, land expropriation, sex, gender, and family during the century after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Seeking to assimilate Algerian land while differentiating Algerian Muslims from European settlers, colonial authorities developed a system that confined Muslim law to family matters while subjecting Algerian property to French Civil law. Securing and ex...
Con Coughlin, "Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny" (Picador, 2023)
January 12, 2024 09:00 - 33 minutesIn Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny (Picador, 2023), Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, examines how a mild-mannered ophthalmic surgeon has transformed himself into the tyrannical ruler of a once flourishing country. Until the Arab Spring of 2011, the world’s view of Bashar al-Assad was largely benign. He and his wife, a former British banker, were viewed as philanthropic individuals doing their best to keep their country at peace. ...
Sam Lebovic, "State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America's Secrecy Regime" (Basic Book, 2023)
January 12, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesIn State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America's Secrecy Regime (Basic Books, 2023), political historian Dr. Sam Lebovic uncovers the troubling history of the Espionage Act. First passed in 1917, it was initially used to punish critics of World War I. Yet as Americans began to baulk at the act’s restrictions on political dissidents and the press, the government turned its focus toward keeping its secrets under wraps. The resulting system for classifying information is absurdly...
Kami Fletcher and Ashley Towle, "Grave History: Death, Race, and Gender in Southern Cemeteries" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
January 11, 2024 09:00 - 46 minutesKami Fletcher and Ashley Towle’s edited collection Grave History: Death, Race and Gender in Southern Cemeteries (University of Georgia Press, 2023), demonstrates how Jim Crow laws extended into the realms of the dead. Cemeteries throughout the Southern states either relegated Black funerals to the margins in existing cemeteries or excluded the community altogether, often citing the excuse that inclusion would create unrest amongst white lot-holders, and disturb the peace of the cemetery. Buri...
Selby Wynn Schwartz, "The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives" (U Michigan Press, 2019)
January 11, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesSelby Wynn Schwartz writes about gender, performance, and the politics of embodiment. Her articles have been published in Women & Performance, PAJ, Dance Research Journal, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Critical Correspondence, Ballet-Dance Magazine, In Dance, The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, and the forthcoming anthology (Re)Claiming Ballet. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley in Comparative Literature and currently teaches writing at Stanford University. The Bodies of Others: D...
Patrick R. O'Malley, "The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
January 11, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesPatrick R. O'Malley's book The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century (U Virginia Press, 2023) analyzes the role of Irishness in nineteenth-century constructions of race and racialization, both in the British Isles and in the United States. Focusing on the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, Patrick O’Malley interrogates the bardic verse epic, the gothic tale, the realist novel, the stage melodrama, and the political po...
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...