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Episodes
EQ Spotlight Special: Roundtable on the 2020 Presidential Race
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 51 minutesWhat are we to make of the year’s first presidential debate? Listen in as John R. Hibbing, Jonathan Weiler and I discuss this question and others surrounding the 2020 presidential race. Hibbing is a Foundation Regents University Professor of political history and psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He’s been a Guggenheim Fellow, a NATO Fellow and a Senior Fulbright Fellow. He is the author of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences (Routled...
David R. Marples, "Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir" (E-International Relations, 2020)
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 58 minutesDavid R. Marples' new book Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir (E-International Relations, 2020) describes the author's academic journey from an undergraduate in London to his current research on Ukraine and Belarus as a History professor in Alberta, Canada. It highlights the dramatic changes of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, his travel stories, experiences, and the Stalinist legacy in both countries. It includes extended focus on his visits to Chernobyl and the contaminated...
Armstrong Williams, "What Black and White America Must Do Now: A Prescription to Move Beyond Race" (Hot Books, 2020)
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 35 minutesWhat Black and White America Must Do Now: A Prescription to Move Beyond Race (Hot Books, 2020) explores the complexity of race and culture in the United States. In his third book, renowned conservative entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist Armstrong Williams discusses his prescription for healing and atonement amidst today’s current social upheaval. Race and racism are America's original sin, and four hundred years later, they still plague the nation, pitting groups against each other. Des...
Joshua Chambers-Letson, "After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life" (NYU Press, 2018)
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (NYU Press, 2018) Joshua Chambers-Letson invites you to a party featuring Eiko, Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Tseng Kwong Chi. Through this diverse cast of characters, Chambers-Letson highlights moments of immanent communism: collaborations, romantic relationships, and serendipitous collisions that point towards a liberated future which also exists in our troubled present. Chambers-Letson draws ...
Alan Brill, " Rabbi on the Ganges: A Jewish-Hindu Encounter" (Lexington, 2019)
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 37 minutesHow do Judaism and Hinduism compare as religions? Beyond the academic merits of comparative religion, what can adherents to one of these faiths gain by learning about the other? Alan Brill's new book Rabbi on the Ganges: A Jewish-Hindu Encounter (Lexington Books, 2019) is the first work to engage the new terrain of Hindu-Jewish religious encounter. The book offers understanding into points of contact between the two religions of Hinduism and Judaism. Providing an important comparative account...
Lea David, "The Past Can't Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Past Can't Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lea David critically investigates the relationship between human rights and memory, suggesting that, instead of understanding human rights in a normative fashion, human rights should be treated as an ideology. Conceptualizing human rights as an ideology gives us useful theoretical and methodological tools to recognize the real impact human rights has on the ground. David traces the ris...
Cory C. Brock, "Orthodox Yet Modern: Herman Bavinck’s Use of Friedrich Schleiermacher" (Lexham Press, 2020)
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 31 minutesCory C. Brock has published an exciting new book on one of the most important Dutch Reformed theologians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Herman Bavinck negotiated his conservative background through life-long engagement with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Brock’s new work, Orthodox Yet Modern: Herman Bavinck’s Use of Friedrich Schleiermacher (Lexham Press, 2020), complicates the existing discussion of the relationship between these thinkers and shows how Bavinck...
Abla Hasan, "Decoding the Egalitarianism of the Qur’an: Retrieving Lost Voices on Gender" (Lexington Books, 2020)
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIs it possible to interpret the Qur’an using the Qur’an alone? Is a feminist interpretation of controversial verses such as 4:34, the notorious “wife-beating” verse, possible? What evidence is there for the possibility that Maryam, the mother of Isa (Jesus) was a prophet, and why does that matter? How are Islamic feminist scholars in conversation with each other, as they both draw from and challenge each other in their efforts to find meaning in gender-related verses in the Qur’an? Abla Hasan...
E. A. Alpers and C. Goswami, "Transregional Trade and Traders" (Oxford UP, 2019)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourBlessed with numerous safe harbors, accessible ports, and a rich hinterland, Gujarat has been central to the history of Indian Ocean maritime exchange that involved not only goods, but also people and ideas. Transregional Trade and Traders: Situating Gujarat in the Indian Ocean from Early Times to 1900 (Oxford University Press) maps the trajectory of the extra-continental interactions of Gujarat and how it shaped the history of the Indian Ocean. Chronologically, the volume spans two millennia...
Laura J. Arata, "Race and the Wild West" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 45 minutesAfter Laura Arata first visited Virginia City, Montana in graduate school, she became fascinated by the story of one historical figure—Sarah Bickford, a former slave, who migrated to this frontier, mining town in the late 1860s, and became a prominent business owner who promoted tourism at the site of a famous lynching of white “lawbreakers” by the Montana Vigilantes. In Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes, and the Tourism of Decline, 1870–1930 (University of Oklaho...
Carly Israel, "Seconds and Inches" (Jaded Ibis Press, 2020)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourToday I interview Carly Israel about her bold new memoir, Seconds and Inches (Jaded Ibis Press). In the opening sentence of her introduction, Israel writes, “My last name, Israel, means one who wrestles with God. And wrestling is all I know.” And that description gives us a sense of Israel’s book. It’s not a mere recollection, but a reckoning, one in which Israel wrestles not only with her own life, but also with the past she inherited, one full of intergenerational trauma as well as intergen...
Frans de Waal, "Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves" (Norton, 2019)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesMama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (W. W. Norton & Company) is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals, beginning with Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. Her story and others like it—from dogs “adopting” the injuries of their companions, to rats helping fellow rats in distress, to elephants revisiting the bones of their loved ones—show that humans are not the only species with the capac...
David Tavárez, "The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2011)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourDavid Tavárez is a historian and linguistic anthropologist; he is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Latin American and Latino/a Studies at Vassar College. He is a specialist in Nahuatl and Zapotec texts, the study of Mesoamerican religions and rituals, Catholic campaigns against idolatry, Indigenous intellectuals, and native Christianities. He is the author or co-author of several books and dozens of articles and chapters. This is his second time on the podcast; the first one was abou...
Christopher J. Blythe, "Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 39 minutesIn Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse (Oxford UP, 2020), Christopher James Blythe examines apocalypticism across the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, particularly as it took shape in the writings and visions of the laity. The responses of the church hierarchy to apocalyptic lay prophecies promoted their own form of separatist nationalism during the nineteenth century. Yet, after Utah obtained statehood, as the church sought to assimil...
Berit Brogaard, "Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 39 minutesWhat is it that makes hatred so addicting? In her new book Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2020), Berit Bogaard explains. Berit is a Professor of Philosophy and a Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami. Her areas of research include the topics of perception, emotions, and language. She’s published five books, four with Oxford University Press over the past decade, plus The Superhuman Mind, published by Penguin in 2015. Topics covered in this episod...
Jessica Martell, "Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire" (U Nevada Press, 2020)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Jessica Martell about her new book, Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire, published in 2020 by University of Nevada Press for their Cultural Ecologies of Food series. In Farm to Form, Martell contextualizes some familiar texts of British Literary Modernism, into a history that recognizes the role of food and agriculture not just in the social fabric that these writers were living in and often writing a...
Serena Parekh, "No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourDiscourse in wealthy Western countries about refugees tends to follow a familiar script. How many refugees is a country morally required to accept? What kinds of care and support are host countries required to provide? Who is responsible to maintaining the resulting infrastructure? What, ultimately, is to be done with refugees? Many of these questions assume that states are morally required to rescue refugees. Rarely does the discourse consider the role of wealthy Western countries in creatin...
Rogers M. Smith, "That Is Not Who We Are!: Populism and Peoplehood" (Yale UP, 2020)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesRogers M. Smith, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a new book on the connection between our understanding of peoplehood and community, and the contemporary growth of populism around the world. This book and the meditation on these issues of populism and nationalism come out of the presentations Smith gave as the 2018 Castle Lecture Series on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. Thus, That Is Not...
Sam van Schaik, "Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages" (Shambala Publications, 2020)
September 30, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesAs far back as we can see in the historical record, Buddhist monks and nuns have offered services including healing, divination, rain making, aggressive magic, and love magic to local clients. Studying this history, scholar Sam van Schaik concludes that magic and healing have played a key role in Buddhism’s flourishing, yet they have rarely been studied in academic circles or by Western practitioners. The exclusion of magical practices and powers from most discussions of Buddhism in the moder...
Takeshi Morisato, "Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
September 30, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesFaith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2019) by Takeshi Morisato is a book that brings together the work of two significant figures in contemporary philosophy. By considering the work of Tanabe Hajime, the Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School, and William Desmond, the contemporary Irish philosopher, Takeshi Morisato offers a clear presentation of contemporary comparative solutions to the problems of the philosophy of religion. Importantly, this is the first b...
John Connelly, "From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe" (Princeton UP, 2020)
September 30, 2020 08:00 - 56 minutesJohn Connelly’s new book – From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) – is an encyclopedic but lively narrative that captivates both those familiar with old stories about the region and novices who are seeking introduction to this vast laboratory of European modernity. Passionate, erudite, and insightful, the book pursues answers to the central question of Eastern European history: why does nationalism persist as the organizing principle of polit...
Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2000)
September 30, 2020 08:00 - 40 minutesIn 1800, tens of millions of bison roamed the North American Great Plains. By 1900, fewer than 1,000 remained. In The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2000), the University of Kansas Hall Distinguished Professor of History Andrew C. Isenberg explains how this ecological calamity came to pass. Bison populations always fluctuated along with changes to the volatile Great Plains climate. The adoption of horse-based nomadism by several Native societies i...
Adriaan C. Neele, "Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706): Text, Context, and Interpretation" (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2020)
September 30, 2020 08:00 - 30 minutesAdriaan Neele, who is director of the doctoral programme and Professor of Historical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, has edited an outstanding collection of essays on Petrus van Mastricht. This new book, Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706): Text, Context, and Interpretation (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2020), combines work by new and well-established scholars to examine the ways in which the achievements of this eminent protestant scholastic theologian have impacted upon theolog...
Michele Goodwin, "Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
September 30, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourPolicing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Cambridge University Press, 2020) a brilliant but shocking account of the criminalization of all aspects of reproduction, pregnancy, abortion, birth, and motherhood in the United States. In her extensively researched monograph, Michele Goodwin recounts the horrific contemporary situation, which includes, for example, mothers giving birth shackled in leg irons, in solitary confinement, even in prison toilets, and in some...
Elizabeth Ferry and Stephen Ferry, "La Batea" (Red Hook, 2017)
September 30, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourLa Batea is an unconventional book. A collaboration between anthropologist Elizabeth Ferry and her photographer brother Stephen, it combines text and images to paint a picture of the lives of small-scale miners in Colombia in a unique and powerful way. Moreover, the book is physically designed to pull the reader into the topic. Cardboard covers, a specially-chosen paper, and carefully designed chosen fonts provide a unique experience which is topped off by the small piece of gold embedded in ...
Glenn Kenny, "Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas" (Hanover Square, 2020)
September 30, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourFor the thirtieth anniversary of its premiere comes the vivid and immersive history behind Martin Scorsese’s signature film Goodfellas, hailed by critics as the greatest mob movie ever made. In the first ever behind-the-scenes story of Goodfellas, film critic Glenn Kenny chronicles the making and afterlife of the film that introduced America to the real modern gangster—brutal, ruthless, yet darkly appealing, the villain we can’t get enough of. Featuring interviews with the film’s major player...
Martin Paul Eve, "Close Reading with Computers" (Stanford UP, 2019)
September 29, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesMost contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history. This book asks what happens when such telescopic techniques function as a microscope instead. The first monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear on a single novel in a sustained fashion, it focuses on the award-winning and genre-bending Cloud Atlas (2004). Published in two very different versions worldwide without anyone taking much notice, David Mitchell's novel ...
Fabian Holt, "Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
September 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions (University of Chicago Press), Fabian In Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions (University of Chicago Press), Fabian Holt shows how festivals and other institutions of musical performance have evolved in recent decades. Adopting a critical approach, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a theory of performance institutions. The two central institutions of popular music—the club ...
Geoffrey Plank, "Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2020)
September 29, 2020 08:00 - 29 minutesFor the people of the Dawnland, they were floating islands. The sails resembled clouds, and the men gathered on deck looked like bears. When Europeans came ashore, whether Danes in what would become Newfoundland, English settlers in the land they named ‘Virginia’, their mastery of the oceans did not translate into supremacy on land. Small conflicts in colonial enslaves evolved into trans-Atlantic wars that transformed the political and social worlds of millions. Europeans were people of the o...
Ariella Rotramel, "Pushing Back: Women of Color-Led Grassroots Activism in New York City" (U Georgia Press, 2020)
September 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourPushing Back: Women of Color–Led Grassroots Activism in New York City (U Georgia Press, 2020) explores women of color’s grassroots leadership in organizations that are not singularly identified with feminism. Centered in New York City, Pushing Back brings an intersectional perspective to communities of color as it addresses injustices tied to domestic work, housing, and environmental policies and practices. Ariella Rotramel shows how activists respond to injustice and marginalization, documen...
Alan L. Mittleman, "Does Judaism Condone Violence?: Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition" (Princeton UP, 2018)
September 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat exactly does the word “holy” mean in various religious traditions? What is the opposite of it in translations from the Hebrew? Is the antonym of “holy” in the Old Testament not, as many of us assume, “profane” but “unclean?” And, if so, what are the theological implications and in human affairs of that difference? How did Biblical figures such as Moses and Joshua justify brutal levels of violence against their enemies? What motivated that violence in the first place—and is there, in fact...
Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (U California Press 2020)
September 29, 2020 08:00 - 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...
Scholarly Communications: An Interview with Helen Pearson of 'Nature'
September 29, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesNature is the premier weekly journal of science, the journal where specialists go to read and publish primary research in their fields. But Nature is also a science magazine, a combination unusual in journal publishing because in an issue of Nature, research stands side by side with editorials, news and feature reporting, and opinion articles. In fact, over two-thirds of the pieces Nature publishes are journalism and opinion content. This is the remit of Helen Pearson. Helen Pearson is Chief ...
Susan D'Agostino, "How to Free Your Inner Mathematician: Notes on Mathematics and Life" (Oxford UP, 2020)
September 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourDoing mathematics can be stimulating, deep, and sometimes fantastic. It can also be frustrating, impenetrable, and at times dispiriting. In her new collection of essays, writer and mathematician Susan D'Agostino shows how math itself can be a useful guide through these experiences. How to Free Your Inner Mathematician: Notes on Mathematics and Life (Oxford University Press) draws upon the theorems, applications, and history of mathematics to inspire lessons and advice for us along our mathema...
Robert M. Geraci, "Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science" (Lexington, 2018)
September 29, 2020 08:00 - 45 minutesWhat is the relationship between science, religion and technology in Hinduism? We speak with Robert M. Geraci about his research into religious ideas and practices in Indian science and engineering circles. Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science (Lexington, 2018) uses ethnographic data to investigate the presence of religious ideas and practices in Indian science and engineering. Geraci shows 1) how the integration of religion, science and techn...
Ron Snyder, "The Baltimore Stallions: The Brief, Brilliant History of the CFL Champion Franchise" (McFarland, 2020)
September 28, 2020 08:00 - 46 minutesA few years ago, I came across an article entitled “‘Who Do I Root for Now?’: The Impact of Franchise Relocation on the Loyal Fans Left Behind: A Case Study of Hartford Whaler Fans,” by Craig G. Hyatt. This essay focused on the void left in the lives of aficionados of a team that, like the jilted lover in a relationship, must now suffer and find a way to move forward in life without the object of one’s affection. In terms of sports, the pain is even more traumatic when the team that left its ...
Ronit Ricci, "Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
September 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourLanka, Ceylon, Sarandib: merely three disparate names for a single island? Perhaps. Yet the three diverge in the historical echoes, literary cultures, maps and memories they evoke. Names that have intersected and overlapped - in a treatise, a poem, a document - only to go their own ways. But despite different trajectories, all three are tied to narratives of banishment and exile. In Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (Cambridge University Press, 2020), ...
Ziad Fahmy, "Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2020)
September 28, 2020 08:00 - 33 minutesAs the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street vendors, the music of wedding processions, and even the traditional funerary wails. In Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday...
Wendy Wood, "Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick" (FSG, 2019)
September 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourToday's guest is psychologist and behavioral scientist, Wendy Wood. She is currently a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, and a visiting professor at the INSEAD Business School in Paris. Wendy has spent much of her career studying what she considers the very building blocks of behavioral change, something we all know as habits. Angela Duckworth describes her as “the world's foremost expert in the field.” And according to Adam Grant, she is “widely r...
Yves Citton, "Mediarchy" (Polity Press, 2019)
September 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWe think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social and political destinies are shaped by the will of the people without realizing that ‘the people’ are always produced, both as individuals and as aggregates, by the media: we are all embedded in mediated publics, ‘intra-structured’ by the apparatuses of communication that govern our interactions. In h...
Bruce Isaacs, "The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators" (Oxford UP, 2020)
September 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators (Oxford University Press) is the first book-length study to examine the historical foundations and stylistic mechanics of pure cinema. Author Bruce Isaacs, Associate Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Sydney, explores the potential of a philosophical and artistic approach most explicitly demonstrated by Hitchcock in his later films, beginning with Hitchcock's contact with the European avan...
Karen Quigley, "Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure" (Methuen Drama, 2020)
September 28, 2020 08:00 - 43 minutesFrom the gouging out of eyes in Shakespeare's King Lear or Sarah Kane's Cleansed, to the adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, theatre has long been intrigued by the staging of challenging plays and impossible texts, images or ideas. Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure (Methuen Drama) examines this phenomenon of what the theatre cannot do or has not been able to do at various points in its history. The book explores four principal areas to which unst...
Fabio Rambelli, "Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
September 28, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesIn Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) seem to be quite deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric. From ancestor cults to anime, spirits, ghosts, and other invisible dimensions of reality appear to be pervasive. In Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), international scholars from various backgrounds consider together this “invisible empire” and highlight...
Gene Ludwig, "The Vanishing American Dream" (Disruption Books, 2020)
September 28, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesGene Ludwig cares. The former banker, government regulator, and serial entrepreneur cares deeply about the hollowing out of the American middle class over the past several decades, not least of all in his hometown of York, PA. So he gathered the country's best and brightest in 2019 for a conference at Yale Law School to come up with specific policy proposals that can reverse that process. The details of what has happened make for difficult but necessary reading. In The Vanishing American Drea...
Lorenz M. Lüthi, "Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
September 25, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Standard narratives focus on Soviet-American rivalry as if the superpowers were the exclusive driving forces of the international system. Lorenz M. Lüthi, Associate Professor of History at McGill University in his new book Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), offers a radically different account, restoring agency to regional powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe and rev...
Donald Ostrowski, "Who Wrote That?: Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov" (NIUP, 2020)
September 25, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourdWho Wrote That?: Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov (Northern Illinois University Press) is Harvard historian Donald Ostrowski’s sustained reflection on what we can learn from comparison of authorship controversies. Ostrowski covers nine different cases of disputed authorship, from the Shakespeare canon, to the letters between the Russian Prince Kurbskii and Ivan IV, to the ancient Hebrew Pentateuch. This book lays out evidence from all points of view in an even-handed way, and...
François-Xavier Fauvelle, "The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages" (Princeton UP, 2018)
September 25, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat are the African Middle Ages? A place, certainly, and a time period, evidently. But also a “documentary regime,” argues François-Xavier Fauvelle. How do we reconstruct these centuries of the African past in the face of a daunting lack of sources? In thirty-four thoughtful vignettes, Fauvelle takes us along for the ride as he wrestles with this question. From Aksum to the Swahili coast, and Sijilmâsa to South Africa, the distances covered by The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African ...
Giorgio Bertellini, "The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and the Political Leadership in 1920s America" (U California Press, 2019)
September 25, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesIn 1927, the Hollywood stars (and spouses), Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr stood outside their California home, arms raised in fascist salute. The photo’s caption, referencing the couple’s trip to Rome the previous year, informs fans that the couple “greet guests at their beach camp in true Italian style.” How did “America’s sweetheart” and her husband, a swashbuckler on and off screen, both patriots who had promoted Liberty bonds following the United States’ entry into World War I, ...
Gregory A. Daddis, "Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
September 25, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesIn his compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge UP, 2020), Gregory Daddis explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while wo...
G. Smulewicz-Zucker and M. Thompson, "An Inheritance for Our Times: Principles and Politics of Democratic Socialism" (OR Books, 2020)
September 25, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourDemocratic socialism is on the lips of activists and politicians from both the left and the right. Some call it extremism; some call it common sense. What are we talking about? At a time when the capitalist experiment has made fewer people richer than ever before and seems to be well on the way to killing the planet, a new generation is reassessing old-fashioned principles of community. Millions are looking to democratic socialist values-much as they are now championed by the Squad's Green Ne...