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Episodes
Andrea Benjamin, "Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
August 13, 2020 08:00 - 47 minutesWhat explains voting behavior in local elections? More specifically, what explains how ethnic and racial blocs vote in local elections, especially when the candidate may be of a different race or ethnicity? These are the main question animating the research in Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Political Scientist Andrea Benjamin examines the coalitions that form in local elections and the roles that they play i...
Naomi Appleton, "Many Buddhas, One Buddha: A Study and Translation of Avadānaśataka 1-40" (Equinox, 2020)
August 13, 2020 08:00 - 47 minutesNaomi Appleton's new book Many Buddhas, One Buddha: A Study and Translation of Avadānaśataka 1-40 (Equinox Publishing, 2020) introduces a significant section of the important early Indian Buddhist text known as the Avadānaśataka, or “One Hundred Stories”, and explores some of its perspectives on buddhahood. This text, composed in Sanskrit and dating to perhaps the third to fifth centuries of the Common Era, is affiliated with the Sarvāstivāda or Mūlasarvāstivāda, and thus provides important e...
Vesna Kittelson, "Lost and Found in America" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
August 13, 2020 08:00 - 43 minutesThe prolific artistic production of Vesna Kittelson always maintains autobiographical connections: her installations of deconstructed books and her luminous drawings of fountains recall her childhood in Split, Croatia; her early color field paintings represent people and places she remembers; her war paintings portray the tragedy and emotion experienced in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as her reactions to the 9/11 attack in the United States; the brilliant botanical watercolors in her artis...
Satyan Devadoss, "Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries" (MIT Press, 2020)
August 13, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesThere are very few math books that merit the adjective ‘charming’ but Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries (MIT Press, 2020) is one of them. Satyan Devadoss and Matt Harvey have chosen a truly unique, creative and charming way to acquaint readers with some of the unsolved problems of mathematics. Some are classic, such as the Goldbach Conjecture, some are fairly well known, such as the Collatz Conjecture. Others are less well known but no less fascinating – and all are intriguing and...
Sasha Abramsky, "Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar" (Akashic Books, 2020)
August 12, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourToday we are joined by Sasha Abramsky, author of Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar (Akashic Books, 2020). Lottie Dod is not a familiar name among casual sports fans but should be. She won the first of her five Wimbledon titles when she was 15 and dominated tennis before walking away. Sticking to one game, she believed, was “appalling.” Dod then took up golf, winning a major women’s golf title. She also won a silver medal in archery at t...
R. R. Reno, "Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism and the Future of the West" (Gateway Editions, 2019)
August 12, 2020 08:00 - 51 minutesOne of America’s leading intellectuals has written the book which analyzes and explains the current discontents and malcontents of the contemporary West. After the staggering slaughter of back-to-back world wars, the Western elites embraced the ideal of the “open society.” The goal being: By liberating ourselves from the old attachments to nation, clan, and religion that had fueled centuries of violence, we in the West could build a prosperous world without borders, freed from dogmas and mana...
John DeSimone, "Road to Delano" (Rare Bird Books, 2020)
August 12, 2020 08:00 - 32 minutesIn John DeSimone's Road to Delano (Rare Bird Books, 2020), it's 1968, and Cesar Chavez is organizing the United Farm Workers to fight for decent working conditions and basic human rights, while growers get increasingly violent in trying to prevent unionization. Teenager Jack Duncan learns that his father’s death did not happen the way he’d been told. His best friend Adrian joins his own father in fighting for workers rights with Chavez. Jack and Adrian hope baseball will be their ticket to co...
Nadia Eghbal, "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" (Stripe Press, 2020)
August 12, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOpen source is the once-radical idea that code should be freely available to everyone. Open-source software was once an optimistic model for public collaboration, but is now a near-universal standard. But most open-source code is not developed by big teams or equitable collaborations; it’s maintained by unseen individuals who work tirelessly to write and publish code that's consumed by millions. In Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (Stripe Press), Nadia Egh...
Christopher Newfield, "The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)
August 12, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesIn The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Christopher Newfield diagnoses what he sees as a crisis in American public higher education. He argues that since roughly the 1980s, American public universities have entered into a devolutionary cycle of defunding brought about by privatization. The influence of private sector practices on public higher education, Newfield argues, has fundamentally shifted the view of high...
Karen Patel, "The Politics of Expertise in Cultural Labour: Arts, Work and Inequalities" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020)
August 12, 2020 08:00 - 39 minutesHow has social media changed inequality in the cultural industries? In The Politics of Expertise in Cultural Labour: Arts, Work and Inequalities (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Karen Patel, AHRC Leadership Fellow based at Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University, considers the idea of expertise in cultural labour, examining how it is understood and displayed by cultural workers. The book draws on an extensive and deep engagement with key theories of work, ...
Jeffrey J. Kripal, "The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge" (Bellevue Literary Press, 2019)
August 12, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesA “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,” “a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (Bellevue Literary Press, 2019) is Kripal’s ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists’ spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by ph...
Polly E. Bugros McLean, "Remembering Lucile: A Virginia Family's Rise from Slavery and a Legacy Forged a Mile High" (UP of Colorado, 2018)
August 12, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1918 Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Jones received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, becoming its first female African American graduate (though she was not allowed to "walk" at graduation, nor is she pictured in the 1918 CU yearbook). In Remembering Lucile: A Virginia Family's Rise from Slavery and a Legacy Forged a Mile High (University Press of Colorado), author Polly McLean depicts the rise of the African American middle class through the historical journey of Lucile and...
Jill A. Fisher, "Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals" (NYU Press, 2020)
August 12, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesImagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study? This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Dr...
Deborah E. Kanter, "Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican" (U Illinois Press, 2020)
August 11, 2020 08:00 - 45 minutesWhat happens when a new group of migrants enters not just the social and economic life of a city, but also its religious institutions? Deborah E. Kanter, the John S. Ludington Endowed Professor of History at Albion College, takes us through the dramatic demographic transformation of Chicago through the eyes of Catholic parishes and Mexican churchgoers in her new book Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Catholic churches simultaneously serve...
Andrew Seaton, "Spiritual Awakening Made Simple" (O-Books, 2020)
August 11, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn this inspiring and, above all, practical book, Andrew Seaton guides us to our true nature, the peace-filled observing awareness beyond the mind. Spiritual Awakening Made Simple: How to See Through the Mist of the Mind to the Peace of the Here and Now explains how, beginning in our infancy, we experience a spiritual forgetting. The mind creates abstract interpretations of the world and who we are. These conditioned interpretations become self-fulfilling and create our life experience, our k...
Emily Pawley, "The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
August 11, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University Of Chicago Press) aims to remake this staid vision. Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improvin...
Barry Witham, "From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting: The Labor Plays of Manny Fried" (SIU Press 2020)
August 11, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesFrom Red-Baiting to Blacklisting: The Labor Plays of Manny Fried (SIU Press 2020) collects three plays by Manny Fried alongside a thorough explanation of his work and life by theatre scholar Barry Witham. Witham traces Fried’s long career as a labor organizer and Communist Party militant, as well as the obsessive lengths the FBI went to in order to suppress his activism. Fried is unique among American playwrights in his intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the labor movement, and this ...
Danielle Giffort, "Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
August 11, 2020 08:00 - 33 minutesPsychedelic drugs are making a comeback. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists actively studied the potential of drugs like LSD and psilocybin for treating mental health problems. After a decades-long hiatus, researchers are once again testing how effective these drugs are in relieving symptoms for a wide variety of psychiatric conditions, from depression and obsessive–compulsive disorder to posttraumatic stress disorder and substance addiction. In Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance...
Nate Marshall, "Finna: Poems" (One World, 2020)
August 11, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesIn Finna: Poems (One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place. Marshall defines finna as: fin·na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to [rooted in African American Vernacular English] (2) eye dialect spelling of “fixing to” (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow. His poems focus on the language of hope when Black lives and Black bodies are confro...
Patrice Gueniffey, "Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and History" (Harvard UP, 2020)
August 11, 2020 08:00 - 39 minutesOne of France’s most famous historians compares and contrasts the two most famous French exemplars of political and military leadership of the past two-hundred and fifty years to make the case that individuals, for better and worse, matter in history. Historians have tried to teach us that the historical past is not just a narrative of heroes and wars. The anonymous millions they like to argue also matter and are active agents of change. But in erroneously democratizing history, we – they hav...
Monica Coleman, "Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Faith" (Fortress Press, 2016)
August 10, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesMonica A. Coleman's great-grandfather asked his two young sons to lift him up and pull out the chair when he hanged himself, and that noose stayed in the family shed for years. The rope was the violent instrument, but it was mental anguish that killed him. Now, in gripping fashion, Coleman examines the ways that the legacies of slavery, war, sharecropping, poverty, and alcoholism mask a family history of mental illness. Those same forces accompanied her into the black religious traditions and...
Charles Piot, "The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles" (Duke UP, 2019)
August 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn the West African nation of Togo, applying for the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery is a national obsession, with hundreds of thousands of Togolese entering each year. From the street frenzy of the lottery sign-up period and the scramble to raise money for the embassy interview to the gamesmanship of those adding spouses and dependents to their dossiers, the application process is complicated, expensive, and unpredictable. In The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles (Duke University Press, 2019) Charl...
Nwando Achebe, "Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa" (Ohio UP, 2020)
August 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn this unapologetically African-centered monograph, Nwando Achebe considers the diverse forms and systems of female leadership in both the physical and spiritual worlds, as well as the complexities of female power in a multiplicity of distinct African societies. From Amma to the goddess inkosazana, Sobekneferu to Nzingha, Nehanda to Ahebi Ugbabe, Omu Okwei, and the daughters or umuada of Igboland, Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa (Ohio University Press, 2020) documents the world...
Jennifer Atkins, "New Orleans Carnival Balls: The Secret Side of Mardi Gras, 1870-1920" (LSU Press, 2017)
August 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn New Orleans Carnival Balls: The Secret Side of Mardi Gras, 1870-1920 (LSU Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Atkins draws back the curtain on the origin of the exclusive Mardi Gras balls, bringing to light unique traditions unseen by outsiders. The oldest Carnival organizations emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and ruled Mardi Gras from the Civil War until World War I. For these organizations, Carnival balls became magical realms where krewesmen reinforced their elite identity through sculpted...
Post Script: A Deep Dive on China
August 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourToday’s begins a new set of podcasts from New Books in Political Science called POST-SCRIPT. Lilly Goren and I invite authors back to the podcast to react to contemporary political developments that engage their scholarship. In a podcast devoted to the concerning political developments in China, four scholars -- from political science, history, and particle physics(!) -- provide insights into the devastating effects of new security laws in Hong Kong, the nuances of China’s censorship and surv...
David Livingstone Smith, "On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It" (Oxford UP 2020)
August 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe phenomenon of dehumanization is associated with such atrocities as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the Holocaust in World War II. In these and other cases, people are described in ways that imply that they are less than fully human as a prelude to committing extreme forms of violence against them. In On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (Oxford University Press, 2020), David Livingstone Smith analyzes what dehumanization is, why are we prone to dehumanize, and how we might r...
Stuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020)
August 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourSo much relies on science. But what if science itself can’t be relied on? In Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science (Penguin Books, 2020), Stuart Ritchie, a professor of psychology at King’s College London, lucidly explains how science works, and exposes the systemic issues that prevent the scientific enterprise from living up to its truth-seeking ideals. While the scientific method will always be our best way of knowing about the world, the current system of ...
Sonya Bilocerkowycz, "On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine" (Mad Creek Books, 2019)
August 10, 2020 08:00 - 40 minutesIt’s been a difficult year in America. From plague, to protests, to politics, there have never been so many lives at stake, nor so many questions about the future of our country. Since his election in 2016, questions have been raised about president Trump’s too-close-for-comfort ties to Russian leadership and intelligence. Lately, his antagonism toward infectious disease science and CDC guidelines in addition to his deployment of federal troops into American cities to silence protestors have ...
Thomas Borstelmann, "Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners" (Columbia UP, 2020)
August 07, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThe American attitude towards outsiders has always been ambivalent. The United States, it is commonly said, is a nation of immigrants; today, it’s the most demographically diverse great power. But on the other side of that spectrum have been anxiety about and hatred for the foreign. And there’s no shortage of this: from the English-only movements of the 1980s and 90s to the continued power of America First. Thomas Borstelmann, E.N. and Katherine Thompson Professor of Modern World History at t...
Tanya Kant, "Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life" (Oxford UP, 2020)
August 07, 2020 08:00 - 36 minutesHow are algorithms shaping our experience of the internet? In Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press), Tanya Kant, a lecturer in Media And Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex interrogates the rise of algorithmic personalization, in the context of an internet dominated by platform providers and corporate interests. Using detailed empirical case studies, along with a rich and deep theoretical framework, the book shows the n...
Richard Breitman, "The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies"(Oxford Academic/USHMM)
August 07, 2020 08:00 - 45 minutesThe Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies is turning twenty-five. One of the first academic journals focused on the study of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies, it has been one of a few journals that led the field in new directions. So it seemed appropriate to mark the moment by talking with Richard Breitman, its long-time editor. Breitman is professor emeritus at American University and the author of several books on German history and the Holocaust. We talk in the interview about the or...
M. Hennefeld and N. Sammond, "Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence" (Duke UP, 2020)
August 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourFrom the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke University Press, 2020) move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cu...
Nicole Piemonte, "Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice" (MIT Press, 2018)
August 07, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesIn Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice (The MIT Press), Nicole Piemonte examines the preoccupation in medicine with cure over care, arguing that the traditional focus on biological intervention keeps medicine from addressing the complex realities of patient suffering. Although many have pointed to the lack of compassion and empathy in medical practice, few have considered the deeper philosophical, psychological, and ontological reasons for it. Piemonte fills t...
Francis J. Beckwith, "Never Doubt Thomas: The Catholic Aquinas as Evangelical and Protestant" (Baylor UP, 2019)
August 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourShould you care how Protestant theologians and philosophers view a man generally regarded as of interest primarily to Catholics and as a pillar of Catholic thinking? Absolutely. Why? Because much of what has made our modern world in terms of law, philosophy and ethics comes from Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). How would we benefit from reading a book about Aquinas by a noted scholar who has been a Protestant but who is now a Catholic? That is what we are going to find out in this interview with F...
José Alamillo, "Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
August 07, 2020 08:00 - 47 minutesIn Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Professor José Alamillo, a specialist in Chicana/o Studies, Labor, and Sports history, examines the powerful way Mexican Americans have used sports to build transnational networks for personal and community empowerment across the United States and Mexico before the 1960s. In this meticulously researched book, Alamillo illustrates how sports intersect in the making of a Latina/o identity, civil rights acti...
Alyssa Gabbay, "Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam" (I.B. Tauris, 2020)
August 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, we speak with Alyssa Gabbay about her recent new book Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam: Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima (I.B. Tauris, 2020). The book shows that contrary to assumptions about Islam’s patrilineal nature, there is in fact precedent in pre-modern Islamic history of Muslims' recognition of bilateral descent, or descent from both the mother and the father – though, of course, bilateral descent was by no means universally acknowled...
Costas Lapavitsas, "The Left Case Against the EU" (Polity, 2018)
August 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourMany on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. In The Left Case Against the EU (Polity, 2018), he contends that the EU's response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel that institut...
Ananya Chakravarti, "The Empire of Apostles" (Oxford UP, 2018)
August 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourAnanya Chakravarti’s The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and The Imagination of Empire in Modern Brazil and India (Oxford University Press), recovers the religious roots of Europe's first global order, by tracing the evolution of a religious vision of empire through the lives of Jesuits working in the missions of early modern Brazil and India. These missionaries struggled to unite three commitments: to their local missionary space; to the universal Church; and to the global Portugu...
Orit Kamir, "Betraying Dignity" (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2019)
August 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat do medieval knights, suicide bombers and "victimhood culture" have in common? Betraying Dignity: The Toxic Seduction of Social Media, Shaming, and Radicalization (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) argues that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, individuals, political parties and nations around the world are abandoning the dignity-based culture we established in the aftermath of two world wars, less than a century ago. Disappointed or intimidated, many turn their backs o...
Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, "The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace" (All Point Books, 2020)
August 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourTwo prominent Israeli liberals argue that for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to end with peace, Palestinians must come to terms with the fact that there will be no "right of return." In 1948, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the first Arab-Israeli War. More than seventy years later, most of their houses are long gone, but millions of their descendants are still registered as refugees, with many living in refugee camps. This group―unlike c...
Donna Drucker, "Contraception: A Concise History" (The MIT Press, 2020)
August 06, 2020 08:00 - 25 minutesThe beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In Contraception: A Concise History (The MIT Press, 2020), Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, ...
Elsa Hart, "The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne" (Minotaur Books, 2020)
August 06, 2020 08:00 - 36 minutesLady Cecily Kay has just returned to England when she encounters Sir Barnaby Mayne. It’s 1703, Queen Anne is on the throne, and London’s coffee houses are buzzing with discussions of everything from science and philosophy to monsters and magic. Of course, Cecily has no plans to join the ongoing conversations; coffee houses bar the door to female visitors, however intelligent and learned. But she has secured something better: an entrée to the house of the city’s most influential collector, whe...
David Tavárez, "Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America" (U Colorado Press, 2017)
August 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourProfessor David Tavárez’s edited volume, Words & Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2017), is a collection of eleven essays from historians and anthropologists grappling with the big questions of the Christianization of Mexico after the Spanish Conquest and using sources in several indigenous languages. The collaborators explore the “quilt” of “vibrant and definitely local Christianities” (in the plural) formed by ...
John C. McManus, "Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943 (Dutton Caliber, 2019)
August 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourFor most Americans, the war the United States waged in the Pacific in the Second World War was one fought primarily by the Navy and the Marine Corps. As John C. McManus demonstrates in Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943 (Dutton Caliber), however, this obscures the considerable role played by the soldiers of the United States Army in the conflict throughout the region. Their presence there was one that predated the outbreak of hostilities, as the Army had stationed d...
Joshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
August 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), historian of science Joshua Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy. Focusing on objects and media, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, cigarette cards, an...
J. Browning and T. Silver, "An Environmental History of the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2020)
August 06, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesThis sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world. To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies. But in An Environmental History of the Civil War (University of North C...
Jeremy Bhandari, "Trust the Grind: How World-Class Athletes Got to the Top" (Mango Publishing, 2020)
August 06, 2020 08:00 - 44 minutesSixteen athletes from eleven sports arenas. Each chapter tells a different story, as each superstar shares the habit that helped them accomplish their goals and reach the pinnacle of their profession. Sports fanatic or not. Guaranteed to tap into your athletic edge, Jeremy Bhandari's Trust the Grind: How World-Class Athletes Got to the Top (Mango Publishing, 2020), is made for sports fans and nonfans alike. Fans of professional athletes get an in-depth look at their heroes’ climb to the top; ...
W. J. Perry and T. Z. Collina, "The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump" (BenBella Books, 2020)
August 06, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesAs we enter the third decade of the 21st century, American nuclear policy continues to be influenced by the legacies of the Cold War. Nuclear policies remain focused on easily identifiable threats, including China or Russia, and how the United States would respond in the event of a first strike against the homeland. In their new book, The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump (BenBella Books, 2020), Tom Z. Collina, Policy Director at Ploughshares Fund, ...
Thomas Richards Jr., "Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of Jacksonian America" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
August 05, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of Jacksonian America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), Thomas Richards Jr., a history teacher at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, argues that the map of North America was not preordained. Richards uses the Republic of Texas, the 1830s Patriot War, the Mormon exodus, and several other examples from the American West argue that during the 1830s and 1840s, people across North America saw the continent as a place where the flaws of the United S...
Samuel Morris Brown, "Joseph Smith's Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism" (Oxford UP, 2020)
August 05, 2020 08:00 - 56 minutesMormonism's founder, Joseph Smith, claimed to have translated ancient scriptures. He dictated an American Bible from metal plates reportedly buried by ancient Jews in a nearby hill, and produced an Egyptian "Book of Abraham" derived from funerary papyri he extracted from a collection of mummies he bought from a traveling showman. In addition, he rewrote sections of the King James Version as a "New Translation" of the Bible. Smith and his followers used the term translation to describe the gen...