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Episodes
Matthew Thiessen, "Jesus and the Forces of Death" (Baker Academic, 2020)
September 18, 2020 08:00 - 37 minutesAlthough most people acknowledge that Jesus was a first-century Jew, interpreters of the Gospels often present him as opposed to Jewish law and customs—especially when considering his numerous encounters with the ritually impure. In Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels' Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism (Baker Academic), Matthew Thiessen corrects this popular misconception by placing Jesus within the Judaism of his day. Thiessen demonstrates that the Gospel write...
Sue Stuart-Smith, "The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature (Scribner, 2020)
September 18, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourSue Stuart-Smith, who is a distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener, offers an inspiring and consoling work about the healing effects of gardening and its ability to decrease stress and foster mental well-being in our everyday lives. The garden is often seen as a refuge, a place to forget worldly cares, removed from the “real” life that lies outside. But when we get our hands in the earth we connect with the cycle of life in nature through which destruction and decay are followed by regro...
Rachel V. González, "Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities"
September 18, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourA quinceañera is a traditional fifteenth birthday celebration for young women (though in contemporary times, it can also be for young men) in many Latinx communities. While the celebration has roots in religiosity, it has also become a space for imagining and performing class, identity, and Americanity. With fieldwork conducted in California, Texas, Indiana, and Mexico City, Dr. Rachel Gonzàlez provides a richly nuanced study in her recent book Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx C...
Zachary Dorner, "Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long 18th Century" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
September 18, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (The University of Chicago Press), medicines embody the hopes of those who prepared, sold, and ingested them. By investigating the different contexts and practices associated with the British long-distance trade in patent medicines, Zachary Dorner unravels the intertwined history of financial markets, health concerns, and colonial warfare. He argues that from the late seventeenth-century, medici...
Victor McFarland, "Oil Powers: A History of the US-Saudi Alliance" (Columbia UP, 2020)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is a critical feature of the modern international system. It binds the global hegemon to a region on the other side of the planet. And it has facilitated capitalist-led globalization. However, as both the US and and Saudi governments have tried to hide the relationship from their respective citizens, it also has been poorly understood. Victor McFarland, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri, has sorted throu...
Diane Cook, "The New Wilderness" (Harper, 2020)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 36 minutesDiane Cook’s The New Wilderness (Harper, 2020) is a poignant portrait of a mother and daughter fleeing the polluted cities of a near-future dystopia for a hand-to-mouth existence in the country’s last undeveloped tract. It’s also one of the unusual works of speculative fiction that’s been embraced by the world of high literature by (just this week) reaching the final round of the prestigious Booker Prize. Although Cook has lived mostly in cities, she loves spending time in nature and wrote so...
Carl Safina, "Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace" (Henry Holt, 2020)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourSome people insist that culture is strictly a human accomplishment. What are those people afraid of? Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (Henry Holt and Co.) looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual within a particular community. You too are no...
Ann Dávila Cardinal, "Five Midnights" (Tor Teen, 2019)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 51 minutesAnn Dávila Cardinal writes stories that thrill you. She writes about lives that face challenge and find a way through, despite the horror that chases them. She writes about Puerto Rico and trauma and belonging somewhere. I can honestly say I have enjoyed every word in Five Midnights (Tor Teen, 2019) and Category Five (Tor Teen, 2020), her two recently released young adult novels that follow Lupe and Javier as they face apparitions, ghosts, and shape-shifting monsters—as well as their own fles...
Ann-elise Lewallen, "The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan" (U New Mexico Press, 2016)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan (University of New Mexico Press) is a recent addition to the growing scholarship on Ainu identity and settler colonialism in Japan. Combining ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Ainu communities and organizations with museum and archival research, Dr. Lewallen shows how Ainu women engage in the “self-craft” of identities and cultural viability through clothwork. Through the embodied ancestral knowledge of cl...
Alexander Keyssar, "Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?" (Harvard UP, 2020)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesThe title of Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar,’s new book poses the question that comes up every presidential election cycle: Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (Harvard University Press, 2020). Keyssar presents the reader with a deep, layered, and complex analysis not only of the institution of the Electoral College itself, drawing out how it came about at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but of the many attempts over more than two centuries to reform it or get rid of it. T...
Jack Santino, "Public Performances: Studies in the Carnivalesque and Ritualesque" (UP Colorado, 2017)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourPublic Performances: Studies in the Carnivalesque and Ritualesque (University Press of Colorado) offers a deep and wide-ranging exploration of relationships among genres of public performance and of the underlying political motivations they share. Illustrating the connections among three themes—the political, the carnivalesque, and the ritualesque—the volume provides rich and comprehensive insight into public performance as an assertion of political power. Dr. Jack Santino is professor of fol...
Omar H. Ali, "Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean" (Oxford UP, 2016)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 35 minutesOmar H. Ali’s Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (Oxford University Press, 2016), provides insight into the life of slave soldier Malik Ambar. It offers a rare look at an individual who began in obscurity in the Horn of Africa and reached the highest levels of South Asian political and military affairs in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Ambar's rise from slavery in the Horn of Africa to rulership in South Asia sheds light on the diverse mix of people, p...
Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourPsychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In the The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain (Yale UP, 2019), behavioural scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: ...
Filippo Menozzi, "World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
September 16, 2020 08:00 - 47 minutesIn World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time (Palgrave Macmillan) Filippo Menozzi offers to look at literature and literary processes through the prism of non-synchronism. The book details the notion that Menozzi finds accurate and relevant not only for the analysis of current cultural and political developments, but also for the consideration of the past. Non-synchronism is suggested to subvert the boundaries of time and space that are united and organized through chronolog...
Ben Burgis, "Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left" (Zero Books, 2019)
September 16, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourLogic, the study of how certain arguments either succeed or fail to support their conclusions, is one of the most important topics in philosophy, its importance illustrated by the common assumption that if one is being logical, they are probably right. However, the importance of logic has led to a certain amount of misuse and abuse over the years, with questionable arguments being given a veneer of reasonableness to cover up some questionable philosophical mechanics. In a way this is nothing ...
Jean Jackson, "Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia" (Stanford UP, 2019)
September 16, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesIn Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia (Stanford University Press) Jean Jackson narrates her remarkable journey as an anthropologist in Colombia for over 50 years. This is an extraordinary book because it shows us Jackson’s trajectory, the challenges she faced, the changes she underwent as a researcher and scholar, and even the mistakes she unknowingly made. The hope is to provide future ethnographers a road map that can be of use when conducting res...
Mark Edward Langley, "Death Waits in the Dark" (Blackstone Publishing, 2020)
September 16, 2020 08:00 - 44 minutesWhile Arthur Nakai is attending a wake for a man he considered a brother with whom he served in the U.S. Marines, he receives a call from an old friend whose sons have just been murdered. Arthur soon finds himself involved in the multi-billion-dollar world of the oil and gas industry. He faces an old adversary from when he was a member of the Shadow Wolves, an elite tactical unit within US Customs and Border Protection. Now that same adversary runs a heavily armed group of sociopathic men who...
Nadine Strossen, “Hate: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship” (Oxford UP, 2020)
September 16, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe updated paperback edition of Hate: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press) dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about "hate speech vs. free speech," showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony. As "hate speech" has no generally accepted definition, we hear many incorrect assumptions that it is either absolutely unprotected or absolutely protected from censorship....
J. Iber and M. Longoria, "Latinos in American Football: Pathbreakers on the Gridiron, 1927 to the Present" (McFarland, 2020)
September 16, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourToday we are joined by Jorge Iber, Professor of History and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science at Texas Tech, and Mario Longoria, a long-time author and educator who received his PhD in English in 2014. The two are the authors of Latinos in American Football: Pathbreakers on the Gridiron, 1927 to the Present (McFarland and Co Publishers, 2020). In our conversation we discussed the origins of Latino American football, the role of World War II and the Civil Rights movement in exp...
Teresa A. Goddu, "Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
September 16, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesSelling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press) is a richly illustrated history of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its print, material, and visual artifacts. Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audience. To do so, it produced a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave ...
Sai Balakrishnan, "Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
September 16, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesIn the thoroughly researched, lucidly narrated new book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press), Sai Balakrishnan (Assistant Professor of City and Urban Planning at UC Berkeley) examines the novel phenomenon of the conversion of agrarian landowners into urban shareholders in India’s newly emerging “corridor cities.” Working at the unique intersection of urban planning and agrarian politics in the western Indian state of Mahara...
R. Pollin and N. Chomsky, "Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet" (Verso, 2020)
September 15, 2020 08:00 - 46 minutesIs there a consensus on the best response to global warming? Not even close. Left and right both bring their own tools, math, and, most notably, agendas--climate related and non-climate related--to their policy prescriptions. Economist Robert Pollin has teamed up with Noam Chomsky to produce a manifesto for the New Green Deal in Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso). Their plan attempts to keep the planet from heating up too much whil...
Sherry L. Smith, "Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth-Century America" (Heyday Books, 2020)
September 15, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe opening years of the twentieth century saw a grand cast of radicals and reformers fighting for a new America, seeking change not only in labor picket lines and at women’s suffrage rallies but also in homes and bedrooms. In the thick of this heady milieu were Sara Bard Field and Charles Erskine Scott Wood, two aspiring poets and political activists whose love story uncovers a potent emotional world underneath this transformative time. Self-declared pioneers in free love, Sara and Erskine e...
Jonathan Haber, "Critical Thinking" (The MIT Press, 2020)
September 15, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, I speak with fellow New Books in Education host, Jonathan Haber, about his book, Critical Thinking (The MIT Press, 2020). This book explains the widely-discussed but often ill-defined concept of critical thinking, including its history and role in a democratic society. We discuss the important role critical thinking plays in making decisions and communicating our ideas to others as well as the most effective ways teachers can help their students become critical thinkers. Habe...
Malcolm Keating, "Controversial Reasoning in Indian Philosophy: Major Texts and Arguments on Arthâpatti" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)
September 15, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourHow do we know what we know? The most prominent means of knowledge for Indian philosophers are direct perception (pratyakṣa), inference (anumāna) and authority (śabda). Then there is the much debated “postulation” (arthāpatti), a point of controversy among Mimamsa, Nyaya, and Buddhist philosophers. Consisting of translations of central primary texts and newly-commissioned scholarly essays, Controversial Reasoning in Indian Philosophy: Major Texts and Arguments on Arthâpatti (Bloomsbury Acade...
Anita Kurimay, "Queer Budapest, 1873-1961" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
September 15, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesBy the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the “Pearl of the Danube,” it boasted some of Europe’s most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city’s liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous publi...
Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, "The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement" (NYU Press, 2020)
September 15, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn a cold March day in 1893, 26-year-old nurse Lillian Wald rushed through the poverty-stricken streets of New York’s Lower East Side to a squalid bedroom where a young mother lay dying—abandoned by her doctor because she could not pay his fee. The misery in the room and the walk to reach it inspired Wald to establish Henry Street Settlement, which would become one of the most influential social welfare organizations in American history. Through personal narratives, vivid images, and previous...
Anne García-Romero, "The Fornes Frame" (U Arizona Press, 2016)
September 15, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesIn The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes (University of Arizona Press, 2016) playwright and theatre scholar Anne García-Romero traces the career and legacy of Maria Irene Fornes. Fornes was one of the most significant American playwrights of the twentieth century, and her legacy is evident in the dozens of playwrights she mentored over the course of her long career. García-Romero shows how her unique pedagogy and her example as a successful Lat...
Joseph Clark, "News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
September 15, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhen weekly newsreels launched in the early twentieth century, they offered the U.S. public the first weekly record of events that symbolized “indisputable evidence” of the news. In News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press), Joseph Clark examines the history of the newsreel and how it changed the way Americans saw the world. He combines an examination of the newsreel’s methods of production, distribution, and reception with an analysis of it...
Majid Daneshgar, "Studying the Qur’an in the Muslim Academy" (Oxford UP, 2019)
September 15, 2020 08:00 - 40 minutes“Consider the works of the renowned Nobel-prize-winning African American writer, literary and social critic, and activist Toni Morrison (b. 1931),” writes Majid Daneshgar. “Hers—like Said’s—are popular in the West and cover most of the principal themes covered by Orientalism, including otherness, outsider-ship, exploitation and cultural colonialism and imperialism. Yet … one would be hard-pressed to find, for instance, even a free publisher’s copy of Morrison’s essay The Origin of Others, in ...
Jonathan Lee, "Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present" (Reaktion Books, 2019)
September 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourJonathan Lee’s comprehensive study of Afghanistan’s political history in Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present (Reaktion Books) tells the story of the emergence and sometimes surprising longevity of the Afghan state in the face of serious external and internal challenges over the last three centuries. Readers will find a compelling narrative and an important reference for different periods in Afghan history, not to mention a larger thread which looks at the definition (by others) an...
Angèle Christin, "Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms" (Princeton UP, 2020)
September 14, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesHow are algorithms changing journalism? In Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press), Angèle Christin, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, explores the impact of metrics and analytics on the newsrooms of New York and Paris. Using an ethnography of two organisations, the book demonstrates the complexity, ambivalence, and difference in the use of metrics to make editorial and journalistic judgem...
Matty Weingast, "The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns" (Shambhala, 2020)
September 14, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesA radical and vivid rendering of poetry from the first Buddhist nuns that brings a new immediacy to their voices. The Therigatha ("Verses of the Elder Nuns") is the oldest collection of known writings from Buddhist women and one of the earliest collections of women's literature in India. Composed during the life of the Buddha, the collection contains verses by early Buddhist nuns detailing everything from their disenchantment with their prescribed roles in society to their struggles on the pa...
Kris Alexanderson, "Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
September 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kris Alexanderson offers a revealing portrait of the Dutch Empire repositions our understanding of modern empires from the terrestrial to the oceanic. It highlights the importance of shipping, port cities, and maritime culture to the political struggles of the 1920s and 30s. Port cities such as Jeddah, Shanghai, and Batavia were hotbeds for the spread of nationalism, communism, pan-Islami...
Gerald Posner, "Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America" (Simon and Schuster, 2020)
September 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourToday’s guest is investigative journalist and author, Gerald Posner. His new book, Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (Simon and Schuster), explores the fascinating and complex history of pharmaceutical and bio-tech industries. It is an industry like no other and a story like no other. Gerald Posner is an award-winning journalist who has written twelve books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Case Closed and multiple national bestsellers. Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin h...
Jessica Pierce, "Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
September 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourA life shared with pets brings many emotions. We feel love for our companions, certainly, and happiness at the thought that we’re providing them with a safe, healthy life. But there’s another emotion, less often acknowledged, that can be nearly as powerful: guilt. When we see our cats gazing wistfully out the window, or watch a goldfish swim lazy circles in a bowl, we can’t help but wonder: are we doing the right thing, keeping these independent beings locked up, subject to our control? Is ke...
Thomas R. Metcalf, "Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920" (University of California Press, 2008)
September 14, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesThomas R. Metcalf’s Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920 (University of California Press) is an innovative remapping of empire. Imperial Connections offers a broad-ranging view of the workings of the British Empire in the period when the India of the Raj stood at the center of a newly globalized system of trade, investment, and migration. Thomas R. Metcalf argues that India itself became a nexus of imperial power that made possible British conquest, control, and go...
Postscript: A Discussion of Race, Anger and Citizenship in the USA
September 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourHow do we have a serious conversation about race that moves beyond the brevity of Twitter or an op-ed? In this episode of Post-Script (a New Books in Political Science series from Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell), three scholars engage in a nuanced and fearless discussion grounded in history, data, and theory. There is no way to summarize this hour of engaged and enraged conversation about racism in the United States. The scholars present overlapping narratives with regards to racial violence a...
Thea Riofrancos, "Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador" (Duke UP, 2020)
September 14, 2020 08:00 - 2 hoursIn 2007, Ecuador joined the Latin American “Pink Tide” by electing a left-wing president, Rafael Correa, who voiced opposition to US imperialism and advocated higher levels of redistribution and social investment. However, shortly after coming to power, Correa came into conflict with members of his own coalition over the future of resource extraction in the country. Should Ecuador try to leverage its mineral wealth and oil fields to promote social welfare and human development, or should the ...
Frederick Luis Aldama, "Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities" (U Arizona Press, 2020)
September 13, 2020 04:00 - 34 minutesAn early wave of research helped make visible the complex dynamics of sexuality and gender norms in Latino life, but a new generation of scholars is bringing renewed energy and curiosity to this field of inquiry. In this episode we sit down with Frederick Luis Aldama, Distinguished University Professor at the Ohio State University and co-editor of Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities (University of Arizona Press), to discuss some of the cutting-edge research in this new edited volume. This rich ...
Edward C. Valandra, "Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities" (Living Justice Press, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesColorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities (Living Justice Press, 2020) consists of stories that have arisen from the lived experiences of a broad range of seasoned, loving restorative justice practitioners of color—mostly women—who have fiercely unearthed realities about devastation caused by white practitioners who have unthinkingly worked without a racial or social justice consciousness. This book is thus a wake-up call for European-descended restorative justice practitioners as...
Ken M. Penner, "The Lexham English Septuagint" (Lexham Press, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 37 minutesOn this episode of New Books in Christian Studies, we welcome Ken M. Penner, Professor of Religious Studies at St Francis Xavier University. After a career that has combined biblical studies and digital humanities, Ken has edited the second edition of The Lexham English Septuagint (Lexham Press, 2020), a fresh and historically specific translation into English of the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. But what is the Septuagint, and why does it matter? How was it used in the writings that com...
Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, "Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism" (SUNY Press, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 41 minutesOff the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism (SUNY Press, 2020), edited by Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, combines powerful first-person accounts with incisive scholarly analysis to understand the phenomenon of ultra-Orthodox Jews who leave their insular communities and venture into the wider world. In recent years, many formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews have documented leaving their communities in published stories, films, and memoirs. This movement is often identified as “off the derech” (OTD), or o...
Meg Heckman, "Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party" (Potomac Books, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 56 minutesDespite her nearly two decades as the publisher of the largest newspaper in a politically pivotal state, the role of Nackey Scripps Loeb in American political and media history has been unjustly forgotten. In Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party (Potomac Books, 2020), Meg Heckman describes the ways in which she shaped both journalism in New Hampshire and presidential politics in America. An heiress to the Scripps publishing empire, Nackey ...
Katherine Kinzler, "How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You" (HMH, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesWe gravitate toward people like us; it's human nature. Race, class, and gender shape our social identities, and thus who we perceive as "like us" or "not like us". But one overlooked factor can be even more powerful: the way we speak. As the pioneering psychologist Katherine Kinzler reveals in How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the way we talk is central to our social identity because our speech largely reflects the voices we ...
Mark Santiago, "A Bad Peace and A Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795-1799" (U Oklahoma Press, 2018)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn August 1795, Apaches wiped out two Spanish patrols In the desert borderlands of the what is today the American Southwest and Mexican north. This attack ended what had bene an uneasy peace between various Apache groups and the Spanish Empire. In A Bad Peace and A Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795-1799 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), Mark Santiago (the recently retired Director of the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum) examines why this peace broke down,...
Pernille Røge, "Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa c. 1750-1802" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesIn her new book, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802 (Cambridge UP, 2020), Dr. Pernille Røge charts the confluence and reciprocal impacts of ideas and policies espoused by political economists, colonial administrators, planters, and entrepreneurs to reform the French empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. Due to this diffusion of observations and ideas, French economic philosophers who called themselves “economistes” and lat...
S. J. Potter, "Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939" (Oxford UP, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesIn the aftermath of the First World War, many people sought to use the new mass medium of radio as a tool for world peace, believing that it could promote understanding across national boundaries. In his book Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939 (Oxford UP, 2020), Simon J. Potter describes these efforts to use radio to promote global harmony and how they were eclipsed by nationalism and the weaponization of broadcas...
Premee Mohamed, "Beneath The Rising" (Solaris, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 27 minutesPremee Mohamed's Beneath the Rising (Solaris, 2020) is simultaneously a far-flung horror story and an exploration of an intimate relationship. At the heart of this novel, full of threatening monsters and ancient terrors, is the accommodation one makes with the exploitation of others, when it serves a higher goal. Scientist and child prodigy, Joanna (Johnnie) Chambers, embarks on a quest to save the world with her loyal best friend Nick. The story is told through Nick’s perspective—he is at to...
Sean Roberts, "The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority" (Princeton UP, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn today’s new episode, we speak with Sean Roberts about his brand new book The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press, 2020). Roberts is the Director of the International Development Studies program at George Washington University. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Southern California and has been studying the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority, for some 30 years, including for his Master’s and PhD ...