Chapters of this book explore Bolshevik activists’ ideals of women’s liberation and their failure to realize these ideals; the significance of women’s labor to the Soviet economy, alongside continued workplace discrimination; state reproductive policies and essentialist understandings of femininity; women’s World War II military service and representations of gender in postwar commemorations; and the role of socialist ideology in the formation of the Soviet system and Stalinist culture. Throughout, Hoffmann places Soviet history in its international context, including comparisons of Soviet women’s social positions with those of their counterparts in other countries. The book makes clear the centrality of the Soviet gender order to the country’s social, cultural, and political history, as well as providing an important historical case for understanding the broader struggle for women’s equality.

Intended for students and scholars alike, this book is a valuable resource for all those interested in gender history, Soviet history, labor history, and World War II.

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Drawing on sources in Javanese, Sanskrit, Malay, and related languages from the Indonesian archipelago, Sastrawan provides a detailed account of diverse forms of history making in premodern Java, reconstructing a dynamic culture in which written and nonwritten modes of transmission coexisted and intersected. By situating these practices within broader discussions of global historiography, this book challenges modern assumptions about what counts as “history” and illuminates how societies have developed different ways of preserving and remembering the past.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit here to learn more.

Dr Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan is a historian, lecturer and DECRA research fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra. 

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Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life Before Gay Liberation (Cornell UP, 2026) is built from two very different archives, the criminal record of some sixty Belfast court cases and shaped by the violence of policing, and the extraordinary personal diaries of David Strain, forty-three volumes and perhaps two million words, brought into scholarly use here for the first time. Out of that pairing Hulme develops the book's broader argument, a case for intimate, emotionally invested methods in the history of sexuality, and two organising ideas: the "intimate queer city," in which Belfast's very scale and familiarity shaped how men met and loved, and the "queer Irish world," which places sailors, the docks, and migration between Belfast, Liverpool, and New York at the centre of the story. Along the way the book takes up religion and respectability, masculinity on trial, and the entanglement of queerness with the ethnonational and sectarian order of Ulster.

Belfastmen is published open access by Cornell University Press and can be read for free through the Cornell Open initiative.

About the author

Tom Hulme is a professor at Queen's University Belfast and a cultural historian of modern Britain and Ireland. He is Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council project Queer Northern Ireland: Sexuality Before Liberation, run with Professor Leanne McCormick, and the author of After the Shock City: Urban Culture. His work on queer history has appeared in Irish Historical Studies, The History of the Family, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and his research has been covered in the Guardian and the Irish Times.

About the host

Niall Herron is a PhD researcher in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast. His ethnographic work examines queer experience during the Northern Ireland Troubles, taking the everyday as a focal point for how queerness and space were assembled across the period, and how sexuality, gender, region, ethnonational identity, and class were bound up together. His writing has appeared in the anthropology journal Ethnos and the academic queer history blog NOTCHES.

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In this interview she discusses her new book Absence in the Archives (Cambridge UP, 2026). 

Absence in official records can have profound implications for social memory, civil rights, restorative and transitional justice, citizenship, social welfare, and redress for historical abuse. Scholars of archivistics and early modern New World imperial contexts have uncovered the epistemological problems that archival silences pose for historical research, and the author contends that absence deserves separate conceptual treatment. Archival absences, both permanent and temporary, have particular resonances for postcolonial countries, and are an ongoing threat under totalitarian regimes. Using Britain and Ireland as primary examples, this Element traces how absence took root in the domestic and subsequently the colonial archive, and how through legal mechanisms it became an accepted part of archival praxis. The aim of this Element is to raise awareness of archival absence in order to prevent more losses, particularly in the abundance of the digital age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. 

Absence in the Archives was recently published with Cambridge University Press, as part of their Elements short book series. 

Aidan Beatty teaches in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Piña examines how ordinary Mexicans actively shaped the political process, made their own history, and fought for equality in the country’s long fight for democracy. The long-term effects of the recurring uprisings in Jalisco were central to the new political system produced by the postrevolutionary state: After each rebellion, authorities consolidated institutional power, elected officials debated the strictures of government, and ordinary people grappled with the promise and limits of political emancipation. Because of the contradictions that arose from the creation of this modern political system, especially those that emerged at the nexus of democratic inclusion and authoritarian rule, seemingly powerless populations claimed equality, exercised participation rights, and demanded respect, even amid the violence and surveillance the state deployed against marginal groups to achieve its goals. Rebellious Citizens brings into focus the struggles of ordinary people to experiment with new ways of doing politics to remake the nation.

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In this conversation, we talk about the significance of comparative Latinx and Asian American Studies, the importance of spatial analysis in urban history, and the methodological challenges of locating Mexican and Chinese women and children in the archives. 

Dr. Quintana is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, with affiliations in Culture & Theory and Chicané/Latiné Studies. Her work explores the interconnected histories of Asian Americans and Chicanés/Latinés, centering women and children within U.S. borderlands and recovering unarchived voices. Quintana also co-directs The Five Chinatowns Project at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, a community-based research initiative documenting Chinese American Los Angeles through oral histories, archival creation, and youth mentorship.  She is the author of Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2026). 

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By drawing on government archives, service worker manuals, and other kinds of ephemera, the book does a wonderful job of focusing on the people on the front lines of the tourism industry, showcasing the ordinary rank-and-file workers who were told to be polite and eager — but not fawn over guests — and to be prompt and attentive — but not servile. By looking at these service workers, this book showcases the important ideological work that tourism can do, both for the tourists being shown a new part of the world and for those doing the showing.

A Guide to Mao’s China should appeal to readers interested in modern Chinese history, the history of tourism, Cold War international exchange, and the everyday workings of the socialist state.

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They Shall Not See the Dawn: The Manhunt for the Third Reich's Most Wanted (Diversion Books, 2026) by Charles Lachman is the true historical thriller following a secret unit of American agents, drawn from every walk of life, hunting Hitler’s inner circle—the dangerous henchmen still at large and feared to be carrying their Führer’s final political testament, orders for a guerilla resistance, and plans for rocket and nuclear programs hidden in mountain strongholds. It was a race against time to capture World War II’s most notorious Nazis before they could vanish or rally a new resistance. 

The CIC men leading the greatest manhunt in history were scholars, motivated college students, an actor, linguists, young draftees and refugees—men like Henry Kissinger—armed not just with guns, but with intellect, intuition, and sheer daring. Their quarry included Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the monstrous Gestapo chief; Julius Streicher, Hitler’s notorious “Jew-baiter”; Robert Ley, master of slave labor; and other high-ranking war criminals desperate to escape justice. Against all odds, the CIC brought them down, ensuring their places in the dock at Nuremberg.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Age of Atlantic Revolution was a defining moment in western history. Our understanding of rights, of what makes the individual an individual, of how to define a citizen versus a subject, of what states should or should not do, of how labor, politics, and trade would be organized, of the relationship between the church and the state, and of our attachment to the nation all derive from this period (c. 1750–1850).
Historian Patrick Griffin shows that the Age of Atlantic Revolution was rooted in how people in an interconnected world struggled through violence, liberation, and war to reimagine themselves and sovereignty. Tying together the revolutions, crises, and conflicts that undid British North America, transformed France, created Haiti, overturned Latin America, challenged Britain and Europe, vexed Ireland, and marginalized West Africa, Griffin tells a transnational tale of how empires became nations and how our world came into being.

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Using primary sources in English and Urdu, Koul analyzes the intricacies of caste, religion, and politics among Muslims in colonial India. By asserting that being Arain was a way of being a true Muslim, elite Arains were able to intervene in significant debates about Muslim identity, colonial law, and political representation. Reinventing Caste shows that in order to understand why caste persists among South Asians, we must examine how caste consciousness has been entrenched within multiple religious traditions.

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What is different about this work is that the author Claudia Verhoeven is an intellectual historian whose previous book was on a Russian terrorist who tried to assassinate Tsar Alexander II in 1866. Verhoerven unpacks the various frames through which the participants, the trial lawyers, and the public at large interpreted the seemingly senseless violence.

Manson was a charismatic ex-con whose lived on a ranch near LA with several dozen devoted followers, mostly teenage girls. After a drug deal gone wrong Manson arranged a series of grisly murders. The prosecution argued this was part of a crazy scheme, inspired by the Bible and the Beatles’ White Album, to start an apocalyptic race war. Skeptics argue Manson was just trying to cover up the drug murders.

Verhoeven, an associate professor of history at Cornell, taught a class where she used the Manson case to train her students how to conduct historical research and how to think about history.

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The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways.

Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026)illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building.

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Applying forensic analysis to witness testimony and Jaques’s case files, Sara McDougall finds in Jehanne a woman of many lives and many secrets. An outsider on her own in Dijon, Jehanne had every reason to distrust the local authorities, who regularly extorted money from the city’s most vulnerable residents. Separating facts from falsehoods, McDougall challenges preconceptions about the experiences of marginalized women in medieval France, showing how neighbors, clergy, and other residents aided Jehanne throughout her legal struggles—and how justice of a sort was exacted from her attackers.
Richly detailed and powerfully told, Justice for Jehanne paints an unforgettable portrait of a woman who mounted an extraordinary response to a crime that was so difficult to prosecute at the time, and of a community that gave her shelter, protection, and acceptance as she endeavored to survive on her own terms.

Sara McDougall is professor of history at John Jay College of the City University of New York and is on the faculty in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 and Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Her fellowships include the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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As of 2025, in the United States an eleven-year-old child can be charged with a federal crime while in many states it’s illegal to leave a twelve-year-old home alone. Twenty-six states allow children younger than sixteen to marry while the legal drinking age remains twenty-one. Are these age-based laws really protecting children, and if not, why do they exist? Holly White uncovers the answers to these questions through a history of America’s first age-based laws.

Analyzing trial records, newspapers, personal letters and diaries, as well as legal statutes from the founding era to the Civil War, White shows how restrictive age-based laws were implemented to benefit those who already held power. Over time, these new laws—coming out of child murder and rape trials as well as guardianship and underage marriage disputes—increasingly circumscribed the rights of young Americans in the early republic. As White shows, race, class, status, and gender influenced who came to benefit from the label of “child” in post-revolutionary America. In so doing, Constructing American Childhood explains why Americans continue to be guided by the age-based legal definitions of childhood and adulthood of our past.

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The book raises urgent questions about the changing status of human agency, the ethics of AI-powered data collection about us, and the de facto histories that AI is writing about us every second—histories that may decide whether we can travel, access education, or receive medical care. We talk about the opportunities that this perspective on AI presents to humans (and historians in particular!), how some non-Western conceptions of history—for instance, those of the Indigenous nations of Australia—complicate the dominant Western understanding of what history is, and the challenges we must address as we hand over more and more data and delegate the writing of actual human histories to AI.

Aristotle makes a cameo, and my guest talks about how the economy might be shifting from knowledge bias to ethics bias.

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With original research and clear explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human speech, she demonstrates how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting instead for work-arounds that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Dr. Li reveals, transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access, circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and ever-growing amounts of new data.

At its core, Divination Engines illuminates how the artifacts of human communication—speech, text, and images—have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic culture.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Zelnik traces the emerging bonds of affinity that white male settlers in North America cultivated through their shared, transformative experience of mirth. This humor—a category that includes not only jokes but also play, riot, revelry, and mimicry—shaped the democratic and anti-elitist sensibilities of Americans. It also defined the borders of who could participate in politics, notably excluding those who were not white men. While this anti-authoritarian humor transformed the early United States into a country that abhorred elitism and class hierarchies, ultimately the story is one of democratization gone awry: this same humor allowed white men to draw the borders of the new nation exclusively around themselves.

Zelnik analyzes several distinct forms of humor to make his case: tall tales, "Indian play," Black dialect, riot and revelry, revolutionary protests, and blackface minstrelsy. This provocative study seeks to understand the vexing, contradictory interplay among humor, democracy, and violence at the heart of American history and culture that continues today.

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Italy is renowned for its antiquity, classical literature, philosophy, and modern-day culture, cuisine and fashion, but what has gone largely overlooked – and undocumented, even by its people – is its uniquely biodiverse landscape and wildlife. Italy has over 58,000 different species of wildlife, of which 4,777 are endemic, the highest in Europe. Italy provides a home for a third of all European flora and fauna, with a vast range of fruit and vegetable varieties: more grape varieties than France, more wheat than the US and more olives than Spain. 

Edward Cutler, an art historian by trade, began to explore this history when, four years ago on his small Tuscan farm, he found a salamander that turned out to be endemic to that specific location. In understanding how Italy came together as a country, one of the youngest and still geologically active landscapes in the world, and made up of mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, glacial lakes, desert islands, caves and forests, Ed realised that this natural history has also had an incredibly important influence on its human history, especially its food culture and low-impact agriculture. And along the way, Ed discovers that Italy once was home to pygmy elephants, giant killer hedgehogs, and vampire-toothed deer. Today we can see the relics of those ancient creatures in the flashy blue lizard of Capri, gladiator crabs under the forum in Rome, the crested porcupine, the beautiful Apennine chamois and of course the Marzipan brown bear and Italian grey wolf, not forgetting its flora, including the world’s rarest Christmas tree in Sicily.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The editors and contributors of this collection bring the more-than-human turn to globalization studies, foregrounding not only how globalization matters for wildlife but also how wildlife matters for and constitutes globalization. The volume presents a range of geographically- and species-diverse case studies spanning from the 1870s to the present day to show that globalizing wildlife is far from a homogenous process. Ultimately, contributors reconceptualize globalization and wildlife in relation to one another and foster new connections between the longstanding study of globalization and the dynamic, rapidly consolidating field of historical animal studies.

Contributors are Vincent Bijman, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Regina Horta Duarte, George Iordachescu, Nancy J. Jacobs, Ajit Menon, Gregg Mitman, Nitin D. Rai, Simone Schleper, Jules Skotnes-Brown, Monica Vasile, and James L. A. Webb Jr.

Jacob Ward is an historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written on the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he’s currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day.

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Alluding to Robert Campbell's installation of the first printing press in 1862, which led to the publication of the Anglo-African newspaper, the book narrates how the focus shifted from English-only publications to include Yoruba language content in the early 20th century, with books about Yoruba towns and poetry becoming popular. While the title of the book is rooted in the Yoruba proverb, “Oro po ninu iwe kobo”, reflecting the richness and diversity of content in early Yoruba newspapers, the book is testament to Professor Karin Barber’s motivation entrenched in her fascination with Yoruba language creativity including oral praise poetry, popular theater, and verbal arts, and her discovery of Yoruba oriki in colonial-era publications. 



Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ LinkedIn | ORCID | and Meta

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The first half of Unfree Workers provides a brilliant account of the diversity of coercive labour practices that were demanded under colonial and settler-colonial expansions. Their labour regime was incredibly violent:

A sentence to penal transportation was no trivial thing. The convicts sent to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were regimented, disciplined and accounted for in ways that pre-empted later social controls. They were also subjected to high levels of state sanctioned violence. The punishments and conditions of work they experienced continued to shape their lives long after they became free, impacting on colonial family formation and life expectancy.

Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan show the material links between violence and colonial economic necessity. Unfree workers whose skills did not match those in demand were more likely to be accused of work refusal, which put them at risk of demotion to harder labour and increased violence.

Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan’s Unfree Workers, reminding us that while colonial capitalism is a system of exploitation, it necessarily depends upon class conflict.

The process of transportation was a site for resistance. The convict ship, like the slave ship, was a factory that produced commodified labour for the colonies, ‘converting the idle poor into docile labourers.’ Mutiny offered convicts the opportunity to steal their prison and use it for emancipatory means. Though many conspired, few succeeded, but on-ship radicalisation nevertheless prepared convicts for resistance on land. This included making deals for improved working conditions (including sometimes wages) in exchange for industrious and non-violent work. To this end, imprisoned workers came together in common cause, conducting strikes and go-slows and withholding effort. Just as Caribbean plantations were sites of frequent slave uprising, Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan show, so too were convict workers also legitimately feared for their capacity for violent rebellion, sometimes with potential support from settlers with wider political goals.

Van Diemen’s Land’s extraordinary record-keeping—itself an instrument of the punitive surveillance characteristic of the prison-industrial complex—means that Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan have recounted in meticulous, often mapped, detail the size, activity and consequences of collective action among unfree workers. 

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Greek To Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World (Bloomsbury, 2026) is a learned but always entertaining journey through the world of the Ancient Greeks, their extraordinary language and how it has shaped our own understanding of the world today. After all, what is language but the frame through which we understand the world? Davie aims to bring more than just humour, he seeks to trace the thread of ancient Greek thought that runs through our own civilization, always with the lightness of touch and fascinating etymology. We meet Eros and Aphrodite, Alexander the Great and Oscar Wilde, the stoics, Epicurus and Sparta.
While this is a book about language and the touching and illuminating presence of the ancient Greeks in our current words, it's also about how Ancient Greece shapes our culture today.

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In Eden's Alternative to Appeasement: The Anglo-American Strategy that Might Have Been, 1937–38 (Tithebarn Press, 2026), historian Malcolm Murfett tells the story, using a wide range of primary sources from the UK and US archives, of Eden's push to persuade Roosevelt's administration to be more assertive in the Pacific. He reveals the diplomatic dance both sides engaged in, each unsure of the other's reliability, of their own ability to commit, and tied up in their own internal struggles for policy dominance. We get a real insight into how two once-and-future allies managed each other's expectations, as well as the wider strategic parameters within which they were operating.

With eerie echoes of our own times, Murfett explores the challenges involved in both international diplomacy, and foreign and security policy. How standing up for principles and values can become compromised by the requirements of Realpolitik, and logistical constraints.

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The answer is to make a conjecture: an educated guess that discourses on what is likely the case. Historical examples range from Italian humanists stealing manuscripts from monasteries and reconstructing classical languages, to Jesuit missionaries speculating about land bridges to the Americas, and even Renaissance magicians pioneering in alchemy and astrology.

This collective practice is called “conjectural history,” and its roots go far back. But how far back? To answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest, Professor Anthony Grafton.

A former president of the American Historical Association, and the Emeritus Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, Grafton is a scholar of early modern Europe and written history, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, and the author of many books such as The Footnote (1997) and Magus (2023). Today, we will discuss his current project on “conjectural history.”

We discuss the use of conjectural versus counterfactual history, its founders in Herodotus and Thucydides, and proponents like the explorer Jose de Acosta, S.J. and the scholar Lorenzo Valla. Also discussed are Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the birth of modern science from renaissance magic, C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image, recent scholarship on premodern eyewitness testimony to the supernatural, the magician Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and the best lost spots of Princeton University.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.

Chapter Headings:

• 00:00 | Introduction & What is Conjectural History
• 4:30 | The Scottish Enlightenment vs. the Renaissance Tradition
• 11:42 | Conjectural History & a Case Study: Jose de Acosta
• 19:30 | Theology, Science & The Renaissance
• 26:19 | Lorenzo Valla and the Donation of Constantine
• 38:19 | Conjecture, Divination, and Magic
• Closing | Reflections: History, Belief, and Closing Thoughts

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Fulvia’s success came at considerable cost, however. None of her three marriages to politically powerful men—most famously to Marc Antony—lasted, and three of her five children died violently. She was repeatedly ridiculed for daring to step outside the confines of the domestic sphere. The deliberate and systematic destruction of her reputation shaped her legacy for two millennia.
Ample literary, documentary, and archaeological sources for Fulvia exist, yet most contemporary depictions of her were extremely negative. In Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome (Yale UP, 2025) historian Jane Draycott, reading between the lines of the ancient evidence, proposes a more nuanced interpretation. Using Fulvia as a guide, she invites readers to visit an unfamiliar Rome, one in which women played a crucial role during Rome’s violent transition from a republic to the dictatorship of the Roman Empire.

Jane Draycott is a historian and archaeologist, and the author of Cleopatra’s Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the university’s Games and Gaming Lab.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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In The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (Harvard University Press, 2026), Emile Chabal traces the origins of Hobsbawm’s ideas and most famous writings by exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his pathbreaking work. Going well beyond the Ages series of modern history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm’s entire body of writing. Indeed, The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates globally.

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Beronda L. Montgomery, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and scholar who pursues a common theme of understanding how individuals perceive, respond to, and are impacted by the environments in which they exist. Her primary laboratory-based research has been focused on the responses of photosynthetic organisms (i.e., plants and cyanobacteria) to external light cues. Additionally, Beronda pursues this theme in the context of effective mentoring and leadership of individuals, and the role of innovative leaders in supporting success. You can find her at her website.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Sex Education 101: Approachable Essays on Folklore, Culture, & History (Fox Folk Press, 2023) is less of a how-to of sex education and more of a why. Why does abstinence-only sex ed receive so much federal funding? Why do instructors show gross images of STIs to scare students? The answers, believe it or not, have a lot to do with folklore.

Folklore—informally transmitted traditional culture—has a lot to say about sex. And it is often people’s first point of contact with information and messages about sex. Folklore encompasses urban legends, moral panics, and rumors, which influenced early U.S. policies around sex, and also includes jokes, raunchy folk songs, and beliefs and slang about menstruation or STIs. And thus, folklore shapes sex ed classrooms and school sex ed policies.

Jeana Jorgensen earned her PhD in folklore at Indiana University. She is a lecturer in anthropology at Butler University and part of the editorial team at Marvel's & Tales. Her books include Folklore 101 (2021), Fairy Tales 101 (2022), and Sex Education 101 (2023), and her work has appeared in the Journal of American Folklore, Fabula, Journal of Folklore Research, and elsewhere.

Rachel Hopkin PhD is a folklorist and audio producer.

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In the mid-eighteenth century, Marycoo was taken from West Africa to Newport, Rhode Island, where he was forced into racial bondage and given a name that symbolized the power that his new city and new enslaver held over him: Newport Gardner. In this powerful book, Edward E. Andrews pieces together newspaper articles, church records, letters, and Gardner's own writings to tell the story of his life.

After acquiring his freedom via a winning lottery ticket in 1791, Gardner became a kind of Founding Father for Newport's free Black community. He established and led several Black benevolent organizations that helped the community navigate the complicated waters of freedom as Rhode Island slowly began the process of emancipation. He became a popular educator to young Black Newporters, and also emerged as a key religious figure, serving as a long-standing pillar of Newport's First Congregational Church and later founding an independent Black church in the 1820s. His final act was leading a group of about three dozen Black New Englanders to Liberia, in hopes that a new start in Africa would be better than the discrimination they faced in America.

A richly textured account, Newport Gardner's Anthem tells the story of a forgotten Black leader while exploring the new, but tragically limited, opportunities for formerly enslaved people in the post-Revolutionary world.

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At the turn of the century, Jewish ethnographers and museum creators staked their claim to belonging to the civic nation though the display of Jewish folk art, fine art, and Judaica. After the First World War, the nearly three million Jews in the Second Polish Republic were suddenly challenged with finding a place for themselves in a state that increasingly defined itself as a creation of the ethnic Polish nation, to which Jews, by many accounts, did not belong.

By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers a better understanding of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. This is not a case of assimilation, nor of acculturation, but rather of displaying a parallel culture that was at once similar and yet distinctive.

Displays of Belonging offers a nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of ways in which Jews in Poland saw their present and dreamed of their future. It places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context, and sheds light on ways in which ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in the space of museums.



Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. Book here Faculty page here Email & Social Media: plerner@usc.edu @plerner.bsky.social

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The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood (Harvard University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at the center of the institution’s 900-year history. Constructing each chapter around an emblematic material—straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk, paper, iron, and concrete—Professor William Whyte traces the intimate connections between the university’s shifting physical form and its evolving social and cultural meanings. From the medieval University of Paris, where students purchased bundles of straw to use as chairs in otherwise-unfurnished classrooms, to the ocean of concrete at postcolonial Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, Professor Whyte shows how competing visions of higher learning left their imprint on generations of university architecture, landscaping, and furniture. Along the way, he highlights perennial fears that, within the social space of the university, the life of the mind would recede before worldly interests: that student bloodlines would be tainted by racial intermixing, that courting donors with buildings named in their honor would become more important than research and education, that the allure of powdered wigs and silk gowns would undermine scholarly discipline.

A richly textured chronicle, The University concludes that, even in the age of remote learning, the college campus is irreplaceable. The future of higher education includes fiber-optic cables, but stone, brick, and steel are here to stay.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City (NYU Press, 2026) provides the first comprehensive history of this remarkable institution, from its humble beginnings in 1849 to its abrupt closure in 2010. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, St. Vincent's earned distinction not only for the quality of its medical programs, but also for its unwavering dedication to the poor. The hospital was a testament to the vision and labor of the Sisters of Charity, who founded, staffed, and administered the hospital with remarkable skill and devotion.

This captivating account documents St. Vincent's growth into one of the largest and most prominent Catholic medical centers in the United States, as well as its struggles to sustain its religious mission within the ever-changing and increasingly competitive medical marketplace. A Monument to Charity highlights the immense contributions of Catholic sisters to health care in the United States as well as the enduring legacy of all those who worked alongside them to care for the sick and alleviate suffering.

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In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic.
Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice.
John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles.

The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.

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Americans spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds of that time spent in their homes. Globally, the construction and maintenance of residential buildings account for a staggering portion of carbon emissions. In this timely and fascinating work, architect and urban-planning scholar Stefan Al deftly weaves together archaeology, engineering, social history, and environmental science to explain how our homes have developed through the ages and in turn shaped civilization and the planet itself.

From tiny pit-houses in the Levant and Mesoamerica thousands of years ago to soaring skyscrapers in Dubai, New York, and Shanghai today, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) takes readers on a swift and absorbing tour of the evolution of human habitation. Whisking readers from ancient Pompeii to contemporary Hong Kong, industrial-age Liverpool to postwar Levittown, Al shows how our choices in housing have both reflected and affected ideas about gender roles, privacy, and comfort. Discover how seemingly mundane elements―like door-knockers and corridors―have altered everyday interactions, and how material choices have remade the planet’s surface. He also confronts the darker side of domesticity, exposing the unintended consequences of our architectural choices across millennia, including smoke-filled Neolithic dwellings, deadly fires in crowded Roman apartment buildings, and worsening social isolation in car-dependent suburbs. Finally, he examines the myths and reality of future housing, including 3D-printed homes and space architecture built by robots.

Drawing from personal experiences across global cities and professional insights, Al illuminates how our choices in housing continue to influence everything from social relationships to climate change, ultimately arguing that understanding this rich history is crucial for building a more sustainable future. With billions more people needing housing in the coming decades, Dwelling on Earth reveals how we might transform humanity’s defining challenge into our greatest opportunity.

HOST BIO: Alex Hallbom is an urban planner and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Matthew Pinsker’s groundbreaking Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln (W.W. Norton & Company, 2026) draws extensively on Lincoln’s private correspondence to move beyond the marble icon and realize a flesh-and-blood character in Boss Lincoln. Behind closed doors he was shrewd and insistent, capable of deft manipulation, blunt intimidation, or thoughtful argument as needed. As a decision-maker he was attentive to detail but kept his own counsel and trusted his own acumen. His aides noted that in cabinet meetings Lincoln had the final say, and “there is no cavil.” Devoted to elections, he kept careful, handwritten tallies of party turnout, even gifting one to Mary Todd, another partisan, during their courtship. His hymn to democracy at Gettysburg in 1863 carried a partisan message to the political leaders gathered there: The fight for the union would take place at the polls as well as on the battlefield. Boss Lincoln often sacrificed candor for purpose. He used his White House meeting with Frederick Douglass in 1864, ostensibly about emancipation, to send a message to radicals about his need for their support. With emancipation and the war’s outcome at stake, facing withering criticism from all sides, Lincoln won reelection by building a new political coalition through the Union party. Here was Boss Lincoln at his height, captured in absorbing detail in this indelible portrait of our greatest president.

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Blair L.M. Kelley, Ph.D. is a renowned author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. She is the seventh president of the National Humanities Center, the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Blair previously held senior leadership roles at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of the American South and at North Carolina State University where she served as Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Affairs and Partnerships and the Alumni Graduate Professor of History. You can find her on all social platforms @profblmkelley.

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Historians have examined how the practice of African enslavement emerged within one or two tribes, how forced migration affected slavery within particular nations, and how the debate over slavery divided multiple Indigenous nations. Dr. Oertel, however, is the first to examine Indian Territory as a whole, its significance to the sectional debates, and its role as an incubator of emancipation policies in the United States. Knitting together these individual tribal narratives and supplementing them with extensive primary research on how slavery functioned across Indian Territory, she integrates Indian country into the antebellum march toward the Civil War.

Seeking Freedom in Indian Country joins a rising chorus of studies that integrate southern and western history, which, by default, also pulls together the history of the so-called Indian Wars with the Civil War. Dr. Oertel suggests that we cannot fully understand the causes of the Civil War without also considering the changes brought about by the forced removal of Indians. She argues that settler colonialism and the expansion of African chattel slavery together set the stage for sectional conflict to explode in the West. Ironically, both Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism and Black resistance to slavery challenged white supremacy in ways that foretold the end of slavery but also furthered the settler colonial project.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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In 1776 people could hear the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in public squares and could read it in the pages of their local newspapers. Stories of the Declaration typically recount the work that took place inside the Continental Congress, focusing on the men tasked with drafting the text. Although Congress declared independence, the work of spreading the news involved printers, post riders, ship captains, civic leaders, soldiers, clerks, orators, preachers, diplomats, and translators.

When the Declaration of Independence Was News reveals the stories behind how the Declaration was communicated in the United States and around the Atlantic. Tracing the travels of the founding document of the United States from Philadelphia to New York, Boston, Charleston, London, Leiden, Paris, and beyond, Emily Sneff shows how people both celebrated the Declaration and critiqued it. In the weeks after the document was penned, it was printed in the columns of newspapers, translated into German and French, and shared with Native American allies. The document induced some people to make public their privately held beliefs about whether they wanted the United States to be independent or to reconcile with King George III. The Declaration was met with unique circumstances everywhere it went, and people modified the text along the way. The questions of who experienced the news of independence, when, and how reveal an expansive and complex history of a critical moment in the American Revolution.

Published for the 250th anniversary of American independence, When the Declaration of Independence Was News returns to a time before the legacy of these words and the outcome of the war against Great Britain were known to reconsider what the founding of the United States meant to the people who were living through it.

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In The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway (MIT Press, 2026), Virginia McGee Richards documents the lost narrative of the Inner Passage through 60 extraordinary photographs of landscapes altered by slavery and portraits of Lowcountry descendants, along with an essay describing her discovery of this untold history. In an accompanying essay, Imani Perry writes about her own journey on the Inner Passage, putting Black resistance to enslavement and Southern history into an immediate context. James Estrin brings decades of insight about photography and the power of visual storytelling to his affecting foreword. Together, these words and images offer a powerful living map of history.

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Structured around these “parallel journeys,” the book highlights both similarities and differences in the ways travelers described foreign places and peoples. Some travelers used these encounters to criticize the societies they entered, while others turned outward observation into reflection on their own cultures. Across the anthology, travel writing emerges not simply as a way of describing a journey, but as a way of forging ideas about cultural difference, identity, religion, commerce, and political power.

This anthology will appeal to readers interested in Eurasian history, travel writing, world literature, and cross-cultural exchange. It is also a flexible and engaging anthology perfect for classroom teaching, complete with both long and short versions of each account, helpful visuals, and contextual information — an excellent way to get students thinking about what it means to do comparison effectively.

For another overview of the anthology, readers should check out Barbieri’s lecture “Beyond the Mountains and Seas,” available on YouTube here.

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Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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From the late nineteenth century, Ireland featured prominently in Russian liberal, conservative, and radical debates about land politics, self-determination, and empire. Equally, Irish commentators from across the political spectrum used Russia as a lens onto questions of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. But while the Irish and Russian revolutionary contexts are well-studied in isolation, their myriad political, social, and cultural entanglements are not.
Drawing on extensive Russian and Irish archival accounts, newspapers, diaries, letters, memoirs, literary, and visual sources, Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923 (Oxford UP, 2026) looks in both directions at Irish responses to Russian revolutionary change and at representations of Ireland in Russian-language texts from the 1905 Russian Revolution to the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. The result is a unique account of international engagement in revolutionary Russia and Ireland and of how Ireland was imagined beyond the Anglophone world. This mutual, if selective and conditional, engagement reflected wider technological changes in news communication and the expansion of international news agencies. Diasporic networks, including in Britain and the US, helped to shape Russo-Irish relations and Irish publications and political actors engaged with different parts of the Russian empire, including Ukraine, Finland, and Poland.
Through five thematic chapters, the book considers Russo-Irish relations from contrasting and often overlooked angles, including Irish eyewitness experiences on the Eastern front during World War One and religious perspectives. Using a transnational methodology and expansive source base, the book offers a fresh angle on the entangled history of revolutions in the early twentieth century and the translation of news and ideas across borders.

Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905–1923 will be published in September 2026 with Oxford University Press

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Kelsey Brosnan is an art historian specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. Her book on the still-life painter Anne Vallayer-Coster was published by Lund Humphries and Getty Publications in 2026. kb2348@gmail.com

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Ashton Lazarus reveals how these unruly arts were documented by the very elites they unsettled, appearing in historical chronicles, diaries, prose, poetry, and illustrated scrolls. More than mere precursors to later forms like noh and kyōgen, these performances formed a dynamic cultural force with real political impact. By tracing their influence through literary studies, performance studies, and historiography, Lazarus rethinks the interplay between politics, class, and culture in Heian Japan.

Performing Transgression illuminates how acts of defiance and creative expression resonate across time, offering fresh insights into the ways performance bridges the vanished past and the present.

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In Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Court Cabinet (Potomac Books, an Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2026), Michael Patrick Cullinane explains that the inner circle led the administration’s campaigns against corporate greed, investigated public health violations, and formulated consumer protections. They founded environmental conservation policies, prosecuted civil rights violations, and implemented bureaucratic efficiencies that saved the government billions. Roosevelt’s tennis mates shaped the nation’s diplomacy, ending wars and promoting American interests abroad.

Never had a more eclectic group advised a U.S. president. The Tennis Cabinet included legendary frontier lawman Seth Bullock and the starched-shirt corporate lawyer Henry Stimson, who served in five presidential administrations. Texas wolf wrangler Jack Abernathy played with stuffy bureaucrats like Labor Commissioner Charles Patrick Neill and social activist James Bronson Reynolds. The French ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand spun yarns with football hero George Washington Woodruff and Roosevelt’s college friend and banker Robert Bacon. James Garfield, namesake son of a martyred president, sipped mint juleps with Supreme Court Justice William Henry Moody. And J. P. Morgan’s silver-spooned son-in-law Herbert Satterlee kept company with rugged soldier Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly.

For all their differences, these men shared a desire to help the president transform the nation from a parochial nineteenth-century republic into an imperial and industrial global power. They have escaped the attention of reporters and historians only because of Roosevelt’s towering celebrity. Turning away from Roosevelt as the singular force behind his administration, it is possible to see how the contributions of his Tennis Cabinet quietly sowed the seeds of the American Century.

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Taking pictures from downtown Bowling Green and its skyscrapers to uptown Inwood with its fields and wildflowers, Hine depicted a Broadway animated by the presence of the past and the relentless pressures of change.

Through his lens appear shanties, brownstones and country houses; horse-drawn wagons and trolley cars; downtown sex workers and uptown famers.

Hines’ photographs lingered in the collection of the New York Historical until they were discovered by Nick Yablon, a professor of history and American Studies at the University of Iowa.

Now they appear in Nick’s new book, From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: C.G. Hine’s 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway (Columbia University Press, 2026).

Combining Hines’ photographs with his own analysis, along with maps and other images, Nick has produced an illuminating book that depicts Broadway, its peoples, its buildings, and the many neighborhoods that Broadway traverses, at a distinct moment in time.

A digital companion to From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower, with a selection of Hine’s photographs, an interactive map of Broadway, and more, can be found here.

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McNiven investigates diverse cultural practices including shipbuilding, the treatment of shipwrecks and shipwreck victims, and maritime resource use, interpreting the evidence through the perspectives of mariners who understood the seas to be sentient and capable of acting with intentionality. He introduces the concepts of “terrestrial seascapes” and “ontological switching” to illustrate how land-based shrines and votive offerings extend maritime cosmologies and maintain a liminal transition from land to sea. By bridging anthropological and archaeological research with transdisciplinary blue humanities scholarship, Sentient Seas approaches seas as spiritscapes, recontextualizing folkloric beliefs about maritime superstitions.

Ian J. McNiven is Research Professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator with the Australian research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea.

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The author, Kelly M. Duke Bryant, is an Associate Professor of History at Rowan University and the current President of the French Colonial Historical Society.

The host, Elisa Prosperetti, is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore. She is the author of An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

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At the center of Parkinson's story are two families whose entwined histories ended in tragedy. The family of Shickellamy, one of the most renowned Indigenous leaders of the eighteenth century, were Iroquois diplomats laboring to create a world where settlers and Native people could coexist. The Cresaps were frontiersmen who became famous throughout the colonies for their bravado, scheming, and land greed. Together, the families helped determine the fate of the British and French empires, which were battling for control of the Ohio River Valley. From the Seven Years' War to the protests over the Stamp Act to the start of the Revolutionary War, Parkinson recounts the major turning points of the era from a vantage that allows us to see them anew, and to perceive how bewildering they were to people at the time.

For the Shickellamy family, it all came to an end on April 30, 1774, when most of the clan were brutally murdered by white settlers associated with the Cresaps at a place called Yellow Creek. That horrific event became news all over the continent, and it led to war in the interior, at the very moment the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Michael Cresap, at first blamed for the massacre at Yellow Creek, would be transformed by the Revolution into a hero alongside George Washington. In death, he helped cement the pioneer myth at the heart of the new republic.

Parkinson argues that American history is, in fact, tied to the frontier, just not in the ways we are often told. Altering our understanding of the past, he also shows what this new understanding should mean for us today.

Robert G. Parkinson is professor of history at Binghamton University.

Edward J. Blum is a professor of nineteenth-century United States History in the History Department at San Diego State University.

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In the decades after the American Civil War, major insurance companies instructed agents to deny fire insurance to Jewish customers, claiming they were uniquely prone to arson. That accusation quickly spread beyond the insurance industry, finding its way into newspapers, cartoons, vaudeville, popular songs, and silent films, helping to cement the image of the "Jewish firebug" in the American imagination.

Drawing on fire department records, insurance files, trial transcripts, newspapers, and other archival sources, Marx untangles the complicated relationship between stereotype and reality. He explores why some Jewish immigrants became involved in organized arson schemes, how insurance companies often enabled those crimes for their own financial interests, and why Jews became the only ethnic group in America burdened with this particular accusation. The result is a nuanced history that reveals as much about immigrant life, poverty, and urban America as it does about the enduring power of antisemitic myths.

Together, Marx and Katz examine how stereotypes are created, why they persist long after the facts have faded, and what this forgotten episode teaches us about the history—and continuing evolution—of antisemitism in the United States.

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Professor Phillips illustrates how cats have always occupied spaces both familiar and mysterious and how their perceived independence and disruptive nature—and their associations with women, the supernatural, and outsiders—have shaped humans' attitudes toward these fascinating creatures. Cats have been lauded as companions and vermin-killers, reviled as threats to moral and ecological order, and cherished for the very qualities that make them hard to control. This richly textured portrait of cats explores their significance in religion, politics, gender, literature, warfare, and pop culture. It also provides profound insights into our relationships with other animals, especially dogs and rodents.

The many roles that cats have played throughout history illuminate a variety of contradictions in humans' perceptions of them: as affectionate yet aloof, adorable and evil, ordinary and exceptional. This book is the definitive story of the feline presence in human history—an elegant study of how we live with animals whom we see as living by their own rules.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Paul K. Helseth (PhD, Marquette University) is associate professor of Christian thought at Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the author of Right Reason and the Princeton Mind (2010).

David Smith (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is pastor in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church and adjunct faculty in historical theology at Erksine Theological Seminary. He received his M.Div. from Covenant Seminary (1995) and completed his dissertation, published as B. B. Warfield’s Scientifically Constructive Theological Scholarship in 2010, under John Woodbridge.

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Dr. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim is associate professor of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel. He is the author of America’s Other Muslims and Gullah Geechee Muslims in America. You can find him on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Dr. Elizabeth J. West is professor of English and the John B. and Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. Her books include Finding Francis and African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction. She can be found online at Instagram and LinkedIn.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Lauren Duval’s The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2025) tackles the these questions by looking at the experiences of a wide range of Americans, Black and white, in the cities occupied by the British during the American Revolution. Why the household? Because this was the primary social and economic unit of the day, a site where people during the war encountered unprecedented threats to their sense of social order. By looking at households, we gain not only an intimate view of the experience of war, but also a sweeping interpretation of the effects of war on American understandings of gender and power.

Some Americans saw military occupation as a threat, full stop. It challenged men’s senses of power and authority over their families, and the ever-present threat of rape hovered over women and girls. But because occupation could loosen some of the patriarchal control in the household, it could also offer tempting new opportunities. Free and enslaved Black people could take advantage of the disruptions to make calculated moves to gain freedom—or more freedom than they currently enjoyed. Black and white women could hope for a different kind of freedom when they forged relationships with military men. In all, The Home Front reveals entire worlds of young women, British officers, anxious patriarchs, enslaved Black women, German soldiers, and wives struggling to survive while their husbands or sons languished in prison or served in the military. And when the book turns to the postwar era, it reveals a stunning assessment of how those experiences of military occupation altered Americans’ views of household social order. As a result, Duval’s book does something unusual: it threads the needle between military history and the history of gender, women, and sexuality.

Join us for this conversation between Lauren Duval and Carolyn Eastman (The Strange Genius of Mr. O and President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) and get a glimpse into the experience of living during wartime.

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Churchill and the Crown (Oxford University Press, 2026) tells the story of Churchill's relationship with the various kings and queens he served during his long political career, from young journalist under Edward VII, through his dramatic fall from grace in the First World War under George V, the frustrations of appeasement during the interwar period and his relationship with Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936, culminating in his Finest Hour in the Second World War under George VI and the coda of Churchill's public service to his final monarch: Queen Elizabeth II.

Ted Powell analyses Churchill's writings on monarchy and his role in preserving and establishing monarchies outside Britain. At the core of the book is a series of studies of Churchill's relationships with the monarchs he served. These studies offer a two-way perspective, examining both Churchill's view of individual monarchs and their attitudes towards him. They shed light not only on Churchill's career but also on the changing role of the monarchy in 20th century Britain.

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Through a granular analysis of those events and the mapping of their locations, Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 (Stanford University Press, 2024) reveals that Harlem’s residents participated in a complex new mix of violence that was a multifaceted challenge to white economic and political power. Tracing the legal and government investigations that followed, this project highlights how that violence came to be distorted, diminished, and marginalized by the concern of white authorities to maintain the racial order, and by the unwillingness of Harlem's Black leaders and their white allies to embrace fully such direct forms of protest.

Focused on capturing rather than simplifying the complexity of the new form of racial violence, Harlem in Disorder is a multi-layered, hyperlinked narrative that connects different scales of analysis: individual events, aggregated patterns, and a chronological narrative. Its structure foregrounds individual events to counter how data can dehumanize the past, and to make transparent the interpretations involved in the creation of data from uncertain and ambiguous sources.

Harlem in Disorder is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a Finalist for the 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prize, Multimodal Category, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies; winner of the 2025 Ángel David Nieves Book Award for Best Monograph, sponsored by the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus; Honorable Mention for the 2025 Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize, sponsored by the American Society for Legal History, and Honorable Mention for the 2025 Open Scholarship Award, sponsored by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute.

Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

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By exploring interactions among Beijing, the Yunnan provincial government, county officials, CCP Muslim cadres, and Shadian villagers against the backdrop of the CCP's nationwide political campaigns since the early 1950s, Dr. Wang shows how Islam and Maoism influenced the ways that local villagers and party cadres saw and dealt with each other—and how these encounters shaped the developing conflict and its aftermath. Providing an in-depth account of Chinese religious groups living under the CCP, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan reveals how religion and politics shaped Muslim villagers' responses to the party-state's efforts to control and secularize them.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Gregory Claeys is professor emeritus of the history of political thought at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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In Nine Days in May: The General Strike of 1926 (Oxford University Press, 2026), award-winning author and historian Jonathan Schneer mines hitherto untapped archival sources to explain why and how the Strike came about, why and how it was waged and countered, why and how it ended. In addition to government reports and TUC reports, he uses reports of undercover agents and spies, "special" constables sworn in for the duration of the Strike, volunteer strike-breakers, Communist agitators, trade-union leaders and rank-and-file members of trade unions; also, of course, the papers of politicians of all parties.

This is a tale of Shakespearian dimensions, replete with tragic heroes and villains and buffoons and opportunists and double-dealers, and contending, evenly matched, forces - both of which meant to do their duty whatever the cost. There may never be another general strike in Britain, but the General Strike of 1926 was one for the ages, illuminating the human condition.

Jonathan Schneer is Professor Emeritus of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of New Books Network.

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In exploring how war worked at the level of the body, the individual and the family, this book demonstrates how Ottoman society and war became imbricated through processes of militarisation that led to significant consequences during the First World War and its aftermath. Based on a gendered reading of Ottoman military and bureaucratic archives, it addresses a pivotal moment in the modern history of the Middle East that has long awaited further study from a bottom-up perspective.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In this episode Dr. Chiara Formichi (Cornell University) and Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma and Journal of Women’s History) discuss Domestic Nationalism. We converse about feminist theory and tensions between Indonesian women and colonial establishments. We talk about food, food choices, food preparation and nutrition to reveal an intersection of hygiene, nutrition, and imperialism. And last, we discuss how imperial and colonial invocation of novel hygiene practices was a global phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century.

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All of these experiences inform his book, Railroaded: A Motorman’s Story of the New York City Subway (Rutgers UP, 2026), published by Rutgers University Press. The book covers his work, his life in New York before gentrification, and how the subway system is embedded in the city’s history.

Robert W. Snyder, interviewing for the New Books Network and the Gotham Center for New York City History, is professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. His books include Transit Talk: New York’s Bus and Subway Workers Tell their Stories (New York Transit Museum/Rutgers University, 1997).

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Istanbul, 1538. The greatest of the Ottoman Sultans is at the pinnacle of world power, while his family and future are at the mercy of their own dynastic law: whichever of his five sons succeeds him must eventually kill all the others. So why not get a head start?
For the next fifteen years, as Suleyman the Magnificent and his terrifying pirate captain Barbarossa face down imperial enemies across two hemispheres, the self-fulfilling curse of the Ottomans gathers its own unstoppable momentum.
From the burning pyres of Paris to the rain-lashed mountains of Transylvania, from Buda to Basra, from Crimea to the coast of India, Christopher de Bellaigue's The Golden Throne is an intensely gripping yet entirely historical reconstruction of the life and world of the most feared and powerful man of the sixteenth century, revealing the price of succession and the terrible cost of success.

Christopher de Bellaigue is an author, journalist and founder of The Lake District Book Festival. The Golden Throne is the second book in a trilogy.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and UNESCO Chair in Digital Futures at Stanford University.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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In this provocative history The Trinity: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Civil Rights in African American Memory (UNC Press, 2026), Sharron Wilkins Conrad traces the Trinity across several decades, showing how African Americans didn’t merely remember the civil rights movement; they shaped its meaning. The Trinity reveals why Kennedy’s image hung beside King and Christ, while Lyndon B. Johnson, despite signing landmark legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, remained largely unheralded. Kennedy’s charisma, symbolic promise, and perceived martyrdom placed him among sacred icons, while Johnson—seen as transactional and confronted by the era’s growing impatience—never secured the same emotional legacy. In a gripping exploration of memory and meaning-making, Conrad reveals how communities create historical truths by elevating some leaders, sidelining others, and preserving their own visions in defiance of the official record.

Raymond Williams, PhD is a political scientist, blogger, and book club administrator with an interest in American History and Politics. You can find Raymond on Instagram, Threads, and Twitter at @rtwilliams16.

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Contributors: Tanya Harmer | Emily Snyder | Felipe CesarCamilo Caro Romero | Ailynn Torres Santana | Robert Franco | MichelleChase | Isabella Cosse | Siwei Wang | Ximena Espeche | Sarah J. Seidman | Rafael Cesar | Alexis Baldacci

Michelle Chase is an associate professor of history at Pace University.

Isabella Cosse is a professor of history at Universidad Nacional de San Martín and researcher at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)

Katie L. Coldiron is a librarian and doctoral candidate in history at Florida International University.

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Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani is the Farhang Foundation Early Career Chair in Iranian Studies and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California.
Filippo De Chirico is a Ph.D. Candidate in Energy History at Roma Tre University. His research focuses on the history of the Italian natural gas sector.

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Chen Shuxia is a historian and curator of Chinese art. Her research concerns art collectives, diasporic artistic practice, and reciprocal relations between people and objects. Her most recent books include Wayfaring: Photography in Taiwan, 1950s–1980s (2025), Chinese Toggles: Culture in Miniature (2024) and A Home for Photography Learning: the Friday Salon, 1977-1980 (2024). Her most recent curated exhibitions include “Merchants of Haymarket: the Making of Sydney’s Chinatown” (2026), “The trace is not a presence…” (2025), “Chinese Toggles: Culture in Miniature” (2024). Chen is the inaugural curator of the Chau Chak Wing Museum’s China Gallery, and a Senior lecturer in the Master’s degree programme in Curating and Cultural Leadership, at the University of New South Wales School of Art & Design.

Olivier Krischer is a historian and curator of art from East Asia and the Asian Australian diaspora, whose research concerns modern and contemporary transcultural art, photography and intermedia practices. His curatorial projects include “Assembly” (2023), featuring eight Hong Kong-born artists, “Wayfaring: Photography in 1970s-80s Taiwan” (2021) and “Between: Picturing 1950-1960s Taiwan” (2016). His publications include John Young: The History Projects (2025), Zhang Peili: From Painting to Video (2019) and Asia through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders (with F. Nakamura and M. Perkins, 2013). Krischer is currently a lecturer and program convenor for the Master’s degree programe in Curating and Cultural Leadership, at the University of New South Wales School of Art & Design.

Li-Ping Chen is a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Li-Ping’s NBN episodes on Taiwan Studies are supported by the Chun and Jane Chiu Family Foundation Taiwan Studies Program at Oregon State University.

Relevant Links:

• Open Access for Wayfaring: Photography in Taiwan 1950s−1980s

• Wayfaring 找路: Photography in 1970s–80s Taiwan Exhibition Webpage

• Wayfaring Exhibition Pamphlet

• Wayfaring Exhibition Video Tour | Part 1 — Overview

• “Between: Picturing 1950s-60s Taiwan / 間：臺灣五六十年代面影”

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The team of leading international experts behind the volume focuses on encounters between human and more-than-human beings. They pay attention to the entanglement of multiple agencies that cut through texts and other meshes. With insights from such theoretical traditions as ecocriticism, new materialism and environmental humanities, they re-expose ancient media to the elements.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Laura Borghetti is a Doctoral Candidate in Byzantine Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.

Thomas Arentzen is a Reader in Church History at Lund University, Sweden, and Associate Professor at Sankt Ignatios College, Stockholm School of Theology, Sweden.

Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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Mesrob Vartavarian recommends two books for further learning at the end of our interview. They are: Anthony Butler (2025). Presidential Power, Jacana Media; and Jeffrey A. Winters (2012). Oligarchy, Cambridge University Press.

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Dr. ⁠Alex Boodrookas⁠ is Assistant Professor of History at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Dr. ⁠Ahmed AlMaazmi⁠ is Assistant Professor of History at the United Arab Emirates University.

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Peter Dobek is a scholar of medieval Europe particularly medieval Poland with a focus on public houses (inns, taverns, and ale houses). He received his PhD from Western Michigan University in 2019. In addition to other publications, his book is the Public House in Central Europe.

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Perhaps the book’s most moving aspect is the authors’ compassion for Kiya Saki, a karayuki-san (sex worker) from Nagasaki who migrated to Hong Kong and later died by suicide. Yoshiko and Georgina spoke movingly about discovering her story. Like Saki, both have experienced life far from home and understand the challenges of building a life as a sojourner. Her tragic fate inspired them to investigate the lives of early Japanese residents through the meticulous study of 470 graves in Happy Valley.

Beyond individual tragedies, the book reveals a diaspora divided by deep social tensions. While the Meiji state sought to project the image of a modern, civilised nation, the Japanese community in Hong Kong was effectively a ‘community of two halves’. Elite business figures, including Mitsubishi managers, existed alongside marginalised karayuki-san and boarding-house operators.

Yet from this division emerged a remarkable story of solidarity. Through institutions, wealthier members of the community funded healthcare, financial assistance, and dignified burials for those in need. Driven by the necessity of mutual support in a foreign colonial port, they transformed a fragmented group of migrants into a resilient and organised community.

This dynamic resonates with Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, which views the cemetery as a counter-site where distinctions of class, gender, and status dissolve. The Meiji graves vividly illustrate this reality. In death, social divisions that shaped everyday life become impossible to conceal: the graves of marginalised karayuki-san lie alongside those of the community’s elite. Together, they offer a unique window into a history shaped by colonialism, human trafficking, global trade, and Japan’s transformation into a world power.

Richly narrated and grounded in extensive archival research, Meiji Graves in Happy Valley fills an important gap in the histories of both Hong Kong and Japan. By recovering the experiences of ordinary migrants, merchants, workers and sojourners, it reveals the human stories behind larger processes of migration, empire, and modernisation, offering a fresh perspective on the intertwined histories of Hong Kong and Japan.

Yoshiko Nakano is a professor in the Department of International Design Management at Tokyo University of Science. She previously taught Japanese studies at the University of Hong Kong.

Georgina Challen holds an MA in literary and cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong. Born in England, she grew up in Switzerland and has called Hong Kong home since 1990.

Bing Wang receives her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. Her research interests include the exploration of overseas Chinese cultural identity and critical heritage studies. She is also a freelance translator.

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Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898-1919 (Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2026) covers a moment when Canadians did not produce professional theatre, but they built amusement parks, wrote songs, and produced records. As the stage (drama), and its variants (burlesque, light opera) adapted elements from the new stages (amusement parks, social dance, and film), the modern culture popularized forms of blackface that impacted white, Anglo-Protestant, and English-speaking audiences, and drew theatrical criticism.

This book explores a twenty-year period in Canada’s history when there was no media regulation, and no mandate to promote Canadian culture. Through an examination of theatrical reviews, images, and textual records, Staging Blackface in Canada locates how the Canadian stage became a playground for ethnic jokes, racial caricature, and women’s emancipation. It also locates some of the first Black musicals and operas to appear on Canadian stages.

This episode also mentions a previous Additions to the Archive episode with assistant curator of New York City’s Poster House museum, Es-pranza Humphrey, and her exhibition “Act Black: Posters From Black American Stage & Screen.”

You can find Cheryl at her website, on Instagram, and on LinkedIn And check out her previous appearances on the Additions to the Archive podcast and Substack.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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In A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2026) Brook Wilensky-Lanford follows this essential American tension from first contact through the 2024 election. This is an expansive history of extraordinary religious questions, told through the ordinary people who grappled with them. It is a story of defiance: Anne Hutchinson, preaching against Puritan clergy; Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise serving soft-shell crab to his kosher guests at an 1883 banquet; and Wovoka, a Paiute man who envisioned the Ghost Dance movement, which persisted in the face of violent government repression at Wounded Knee. It is also a story of community: Millerites waiting together in vain for Jesus’s return on a rainy October night in 1844; Chinese immigrants bringing Daoist and Buddhist gods to their California temples; Mormons pushing westward to build their “new Zion” in Utah. And in the last fifty years, it has been a story of muscular political power, as the religious right has sought to shape the present and paint the past in its own image.

At a moment when religion penetrates even the most secular aspects of American life, understanding its history is more essential than ever before. “It is in history that the very human work of religion happens,” Wilensky-Lanford shows us, “and in ordinary time that even the most carved-in-stone tenets can and do change.”

Brook Wilensky-Lanford is a religion writer, editor, and teacher. The author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and former managing editor of Killing the Buddha, her work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Currently the Associate Director of Sacred Writes Public Scholarship, she holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University and a PhD in Religion in the Americas from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she lives.

This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com

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Pamela Walker Laird is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Colorado Denver. Laird’s publications include her newest book, Self-Made: The Stories that Forged an American Myth (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Harvard University Press, 2006), which won the 2006 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history and is available in Chinese; and Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), a Choice Outstanding Academic Book.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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In A Popular History of Idi Amin's Uganda (Yale University Press, 2025), Peterson reveals how Amin (1928-2003) led ordinary people to see themselves as front-line soldiers in a global war against imperialism and colonial oppression. They worked tirelessly to ensure that government institutions kept functioning, even as resources dried up and political violence became pervasive. In this case study of how principled, talented, and patriotic people sacrificed themselves in service to a dictator, Peterson provides lessons for our own time.

Derek Peterson is the Ali Mazrui Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan. His books include Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent and The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin. He lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

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Aditya Deshbandhu is a Lecturer of Communications, Digital Media Sociology at the University of Exeter, UK. A researcher of video game studies, new media, and the digital divide, he examines how people engage with digital artefacts and seeks to understand how these interactions shape everyday lives. As someone who actively examines digital acts of leisure, his research in the last decade has examined social media and streaming platforms alongside video games and digital cultures. He is also the author of Gaming Culture(s) in India: Digital Play in Everyday Life and also serves as an editor for this book series.

Khadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and New Media at the National University of Singapore, Singapore.

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Dearstyne is the editor of this volume and the author of several books, including The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History and The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era.

Robert Snyder, interviewing for the New Books Network and the Gotham Center for New York Cit History, is professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (Cornell, 2025), winner of the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Prize. rwsnyder@rutgers.edu

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The chapters bring new insights to topics that other studies of Auschwitz have explored before, such as the Sonderkommando, the Czech family camp, and literary representations of Auschwitz. Other chapters cover recent developments and more neglected areas, such as the experience and memory of Romani prisoners, the fate of Soviet prisoners of war, and Auschwitz’s presence on social media. The handbook also responds to a number of recent trends and new paradigms in Holocaust Studies, including contributions from the fields of Environmental Studies, Spatial Studies, and Gender Studies.

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Link to purchase/download the book here.

Bruno M. Shirley is a lecturer in Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg University, Germany. He completed his MA in Religious Studies at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and then PhD in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture at Cornell University in New York, USA.

Dr. Shirley is a historian of religion, gender, and politics in early second-millennium Sri Lanka and beyond. As an academic, he is interested in what it meant to understand oneself as “Buddhist” in medieval South Asia. His research explores a wider range of evidence—from royal inscriptions, to monastic disciplinary codes, to elaborate poems—in order to expose the cracks and fissures between competing visions of Buddhism.

Resources referred to in the interview: 

• Alastair Gornall, Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270. University College London Press, 2020.
• Day, Tony. “Ties That (Un)Bind: Families and States in Premodern Southeast Asia.” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (1996): 384–409.
• Gunawardana, R. A. L. H. Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka. University of Arizona Press, 1979.

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Homa Katouzian looks at this history in his latest book Iran and the Revolution: A History (Yale University Press, 2026), where he posits that Iran is a “short-term society,” one that lacks long-term continuity.

We recorded this interview on May 18th, 2026.

Homa is a member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, and a visiting scholar at the Department of History, University of Toronto. He is the author of numerous books, including Iran: Politics, History and Literature (Routledge: 2012), Iran: A Beginners’ Guide (Oneworld Publications: 2013), and The Persians (Yale University Press: 2009).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Iran and the Revolution. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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In The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation (Harvard University Press, 2024), Weipin Tsai takes up this question by tracing the origins and early development of China’s postal system. The book asks not only how such an institution was built, but why it emerged when it did and in the particular form it took. In doing so, Tsai situates the post office within the Qing’s broader efforts to modernize, showing how its development intersected with political maneuvering, imperial pressures, and changing ideas about the nature of the state.

The Making of China’s Post Office examines both the high-level decisions and the ground-level operations that shaped the system’s creation and expansion. Tsai pays particular attention to the economic and social pressures that drove its growth, as well as the everyday work of postal employees, including the nitty-gritty of routes, logistics, and administration. This dual focus allows Tsai to show how the circulation of mail depended on the interplay between central ambitions and local realities, while also uncovering the work that happened at the local level.

Tsai’s book offers a new perspective on China’s encounters with imperialism, efforts at centralization, and changing conceptions of governance. In following the routes and emerging and routines of the post, The Making of China’s Post Office delivers a rich account of how a modern communications network took shape. This book will be of interest to readers of modern Chinese history, as well as those working on global histories of infrastructure, communication, and the state.

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Key Ideas:

• The book explores how faith, patriotism, and family centered entertainment shaped Branson’s popularity of more than just an entertainment town.
• Reflects how entertainment can reflect deeper cultural and political beliefs within society.
• Examines tensions between urban and rural America and how different groups viewed Branson.
• Critics sometimes viewed Branson as politically conservative, while supporters viewed it as authentic, nostalgic, patriotic, and values driven.
• The book highlights how entertainment, comedy, and audience experiences create emotional connection and community, much like social media culture today.

One of the most interesting ideas from the discussion was that entertainment is never just entertainment. The music, performances, humor, patriotism, and storytelling found in places like Branson can reveal what people value, fear, believe, and hope for as a country. The conversation also highlighted how audiences often seek spaces where they feel emotionally connected, culturally understood, and spiritually grounded. Branson became one of those places for many Americans. 

Joanna Dee Das is associate professor of performing arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of the award-winning book Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora.

Angela Marie Hutchinson is the author of “Create Your Yes! When You Keep Hearing No,” named a Forbes No. 4 book to advance your career. She is a podcast host for New Books Network, where she leads conversations for the neuroscience and Christianity channels. Hutchinson is also a talent and intellectual property executive, former social media professor and BBC commentator. She resides in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.

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In giving a history of Australian worker struggles over the length of the working day, Sean Scalmer historicises things that might otherwise seem universal and stable, including time, leisure and productivity. Decades before any attempt by Australian timekeepers to standardise time, Scalmer shows that some of the earliest working-class activism in Australia was focused on the nature of time and the meaning of leisure. For what was the movement for the eight hour day, inspired by British activist Robert Owen, except for a battle over the ownership of time and the virtue of recreation?

The length of the working day and the challenges of work–life balance are pressing issues for many people, as well as lively matters of public controversy. While the winning of the eight-hour day is celebrated as a past industrial achievement, contemporary discussions of working hours often overlook its rich history. Tracing 150 years of campaigns for rights and for the fair distribution of productivity gains, historian Sean Scalmer shows how these movements successfully reduced the length of the standard working week from 60 to 38 hours per week, and how economic, social and political shifts since the early 1980s have stalled this long-term progress. Today, industrial laws provide inadequate protection for excessive hours, and women increasingly shoulder long hours of paid work with the bulk of unpaid domestic labour. This has produced a social crisis for all Australians, but is yet to inspire adequate political action. As debate over our working lives intensifies amid ongoing political, economic and technological challenges, Scalmer’s labour of love on the history of work and play affords us a way to understand the past so we can win back our time—collectively.

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This was the first major pandemic recognized by scientists as zoonotic—spread from animals to humans—and it marked a turning point in both medical science and global health. Through a gripping historical investigation, Professor Lynteris explores how rats entered the medical imagination of the time. He reveals how scientific thinking about disease vectors evolved in tandem with colonial power structures as plague responses unfolded across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From laboratory discoveries to imperial interventions, the rat became central not just to understanding plague, but to shaping new forms of epidemiological reasoning.

This provocative book shows how zoonosis emerged as a politically charged concept in the context of empire and pandemic crisis. It is a powerful history of how science, society, and colonialism converged around a creature now inseparable from the story of epidemic disease.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Annette Gordon-Reed is a New York Times-bestselling historian and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award,

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Dr. Hannah Shepherd is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University.

Dr. Samee Siddiqui is Assistant Professor of World History at Drury University.

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As Dr. Roberts demonstrates, imperial authorities in Washington, DC; Paris; and Algiers rarely collaborated intentionally in institutional partnerships or alliances. Rather, American, French, and Algerian politicians, soldiers, writers, and revolutionaries—often acting at cross purposes and across political and cultural boundaries—sought power by imagining and constructing Algeria as a fissured, dynamic, transimperial space. Focusing on issues of settler colonialism, irregular warfare, racialized citizenship, territorial incorporation, and pan-African identity, After Barbary shows how French Algeria helped make the American and French empires.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The four ideas, as author H. A. Drake proposes, are monotheism, the idea that there is only one god, not many; individual rights, the idea that there is a limit to what the state can order us to do; naturalized citizenship, the idea that the full rights and privileges of citizenship can be extended to people who have no birthright to them; and creation of a standard by which to judge the performance of states. It is easy, now, to take these ideas for granted. For believers, it seems obvious that only a singular, omnipotent deity can account for the splendour of the universe. Similarly, the common notion that individuals can stand up for their rights, that citizenship can be freely given, or that governments ought to be held to a standard of justice for all, is often accompanied by the assumption that, at the time they were introduced, such ideas must have been immediately recognized as superior and gratefully accepted. The record is far more complicated, and that makes the story of their success far more interesting. By discussing these ideas in their historical context with clarity and wit, The Wisdom of the Ancients reminds readers how preposterous they were originally and how different our world would be if they had not taken hold.

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Timothy McCall's book Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy (Reaktion, 2023) explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, flaunted splendor in lavish rituals of knighting, and demonstrated prowess through the hunt--all ostentatious performances of masculinity and the drive to rule. Hardly frivolous pastimes, these activities were essential displays of privilege and virility; indeed, violence underlay the cultural veneer of the Italian Renaissance. Timothy McCall investigates representations and ideals of manhood in this time and provides a historically grounded and gorgeously illustrated account of how male identity and sexuality proclaimed power during a century crucial to the formation of Early Modern Europe.

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

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Christopher S. Celenza is an American scholar of Renaissance history and the current James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also a professor of history and classics

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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This podcast was recorded as a lecture/dialogue for a live audience at Nagoya University.

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In this nuanced retelling, human progress is no longer a straight march from caves to cities: Farming didn’t always replace foraging, villages didn’t automatically spark agriculture, and cities didn’t necessitate rigid hierarchies. For thousands of years, humans merely improvised. By the end of the Bronze Age, the world had become unrecognizable: mammoths and giant sloths replaced by cattle and sheep, scattered nomadic bands replaced by millions living in cities, and farming on nearly every continent. Dr. Wyman argues that the rise of states and steady food production wasn’t inevitable, but rather, the outcome of countless choices that reshaped the planet and made us who we are today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Deftly weaving together diplomatic, environmental, military, and humanitarian histories, Irwin tracks the rise of US disaster aid as a tool of foreign policy, showing how and why the US foreign policy establishment first began contributing aid to survivors of international catastrophes. While the book focuses mainly on bilateral assistance efforts, it also assesses the broader international context in which the US government and its auxiliaries operated, situating their humanitarian responses against the aid efforts of other nations, empires, and international organizations. At its most fundamental level, Catastrophic Diplomacy demonstrates the importance of international disaster assistance—and humanitarian aid more broadly—to US foreign affairs.

Julia F. Irwin, PhD, Yale University, 2009, is professor of history at Louisiana State University. Her research focuses on the place of humanitarian aid in twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations. Her first book, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (2013), is a history of U.S. international relief efforts during the World War I era; the dissertation on which it is based won the Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

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On the contrary, The Birth of Psychological War demonstrates the role of psychological warfare in expanding the scope and scale of military violence amidst ostensible efforts to 'win hearts and minds'. While casting a critical eye on psychological warfare, Whyte establishes its continued significance for the contemporary student of international relations.

Dr. Whyte earned his Ph.D. with the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia and before that a MA with School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, also in beautiful British Columbia. He is currently Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion, Lancaster University.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Highlights include:

• The inspiration behind the book’s striking title;
• The influence of the “archival turn” on Freeman’s analysis of the materiality of letters;
• A bold new reading of the lives of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, suggesting how their letter writing influenced their activism;
• How the abolitionist movement grew alongside the rise of the post office;
• The role of new forms of technology in shaping social movements, yesterday and today.

Guest: Mary Freeman is an associate professor of history at the University of Maine, with a focus on the political, social, and cultural history of slavery and abolition. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic and she is currently developing research projects on nineteenth-century Black activism in Maine and on the history of abolitionist archives.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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Highlights include:

• The inspiration behind the book’s striking title;
• The influence of the “archival turn” on Freeman’s analysis of the materiality of letters;
• A bold new reading of the lives of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, suggesting how their letter writing influenced their activism;
• How the abolitionist movement grew alongside the rise of the post office;
• The role of new forms of technology in shaping social movements, yesterday and today.

Guest: Mary Freeman is an associate professor of history at the University of Maine, with a focus on the political, social, and cultural history of slavery and abolition. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic and she is currently developing research projects on nineteenth-century Black activism in Maine and on the history of abolitionist archives.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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As Ruth Balint shows, what made a good or convincing story at the time tells us much about the circulation of ideas about the war, the Holocaust, and the Jews. Those stories depict the emerging moral and legal distinction between economic migrants and political refugees. They tell us about the experiences of women and children in the face of new psychological and political interventions into the family. Stories from displaced persons also tell us something about the enduring myth of the new world for people who longed to leave the old.

Balint focuses on those persons whose storytelling skills became a major strategy for survival and escape out of the displaced persons’ camps and out of the Europe. Their stories are brought to life in Destination Elsewhere, alongside a new history of immigration, statelessness, and the institution of the postwar family.

Ruth Balint is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of When Migrants Fail to Stay (Bloomsbury, 2023), Smuggled: An Illegal History of Migration (NewSouth, 2021), and Troubled Waters: Borders, Boundaries and Possession in the Timor Sea (Allen & Unwin, 2008).

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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Kori Schake, Ph.D. is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

You can find a transcript of our conversation here.

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In How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America (Columbia University Press, 2026), Dr. Thomas Doherty tells the story of the archival documentary, spotlighting the first films that set out deliberately to preserve history on screen. He shows how newsreels and documentaries challenged the era’s restrictive censorship and how film began to engage with the great political issues of the day. Doherty considers a range of films—some well-known, others obscure—including J. Stuart Blackton’s The Film Parade (1933), Laurence Stallings and Truman Talley’s The First World War (1934), Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934), Max Eastman and Herbert Axelbank’s Tsar to Lenin (1937), and the March of Time screen magazine. Tracing the creation of the archival documentary, How Film Became History illuminates how motion pictures have come to shape our vision of the past.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters.

By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity.

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Dr. Dawley describes how successive waves of immigration changed Taiwan and how these diverse groups of Indigenous tribes and settlers interacted economically and culturally, creating new Taiwanese identities in the process. Over the last century Taiwan has developed from an authoritarian state to one of the world’s most vibrant democracies and advanced economies. It is a successful independent society, albeit one whose existence remains under a shadow.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Highlights include:

• What a focus on state-level policing adds to our understanding of policing;
• How the founding of the Mississippi highway patrol brought together various forms of policing in the Southwest, including the Texas rangers;
• A surprisingly robust discussion of cows, including Mississippi’s economic transformation to a center of cattle raising and the rise of cattlemen’s “Massive Resistance” in the 1950s;
• What Nina Simone revealed about policing in Mississippi, and the myth of Southern exceptionalism, in her song “Mississippi Goddam.”

Guest: Justin Randolph is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, and his other research projects include histories of police desegregation, rural debt peonage, the Taser, and 9-1-1. His writing has appeared in scholarly outlets like the Journal of Southern History and Southern Cultures. He has also written for popular outlets such as The Washington Post, The Mississippi Encyclopedia, and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. He has received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship and prizes from both the Southern Historical Association and Agricultural History Society.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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Highlights include:

●      A discussion of wildcat strikes and why West Virginia’s public sector workers waged them, again and again, in this period;

●      How a teacher wearing blue jeans sparked a battle over expressions of the counterculture in workplaces across West Virginia;

●      Why New Democrats like Joe Manchin sided against rank-and-file rebellion among public sector workers in Virginia;

●      How West Virginia public school teachers in 2018 used Facebook to organize a walkout that defied the union and won significant concessions from the state;

●      The joy of participating in “collective hell-raising” with co-workers and friends.

Guest: Gordon Simmons is a retired union organizer and president of the West Virginia Labor History Association. He is now employed as an investigator for the Human Rights Commission for the state of West Virginia and as an adjunct professor in philosophy at Marshall University.

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Conspirator in Chief: The Long Tradition of Conspiracy Theories in the American Presidency also mines the deep vein of conspiracy theories around moneyed and elite interests, since many presidents cast these interests as predatory and “out to get” the average citizen. This is another constant approach among the presidents from the early days of the republic through to our contemporary “conspirator in chief” Donald Trump. Part of the way that presidents use these kinds of conspiracies is to set up a dichotomy of those who are with the president and those who are against the president, and this latter group is, inevitably, also opposed to the country as a whole and the way of life in the United States. Knott explains that this was the kind of rhetoric that both FDR and Truman used in their implementation of this kind of conspiratorial rhetoric. This also leans on national security as a point of contention, and that those in opposition to the president or the president’s policies are also potential threats to the republic. This is another dimension that Trump builds on in his use of this kind of rhetoric and division.

In the final part of Conspirator in Chief, Knott sketches out those presidents who go far in standing against this kind of language and these kinds of attacks. Included in this grouping are John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, William Howard Taft, and John F. Kennedy, among others. These individuals leaned into reason more than rumormongering, examining their own biases, and also pointing to the conspiracies that others were advocating. While we learn a great deal about demagogic presidents who stirred up conspiracies based in racism, fear, antisemitism, and classism, we also learn about those who operated differently, who tried to protect the country from such divisive rhetoric.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and peril, its legacy entangled with addiction, imperialism, and the complex interplay of global trade and national development. While the illicit opium trade is infamous, the history of licit opium--how it was farmed, refined, and used to build modern medicine and shape state power--has remained largely untold.
Drawing on archival sources from Asia, Europe, and the United States, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers (Oxford UP, 2026) traces the global arc of licit opium from poppy fields and processing plants in India, Turkey, and Australia to the clinics and laboratories of modern medicine. It shows how both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic treated the opium poppy as a national resource and a means of securing global stature. In postcolonial India, by contrast, nationalist leaders initially rejected opium's imperial legacy before embracing its strategic value amid the shifting currents of the Cold War. At the heart of this story are the cultivators, scientists, bureaucrats, and policymakers who shaped the licit opium trade and grappled with its far-reaching consequences. Their work and visions demonstrate how colonial empires and postcolonial states helped forge the global pharmaceutical industry as it struggled to govern a drug it could not abandon.
Markets of Pain reveals how a seemingly marginal crop became an unlikely engine of modernization, a tool of Cold War geopolitics, and a harbinger of today's global opioid crisis. Blending vivid scenes from opium's fields and factories with incisive analysis of scientific and diplomatic archives, Benjamin Robert Siegel recovers a buried history with urgent relevance for global supply chains, international power, and public health.

Markets of Pain offers an account of the global drug trade in the twentieth century, focusing on the transformation of opium from a colonial commodity into a modern resource for the American and European pharmaceutical industries. Challenging simplistic ideas of licit and illicit drugs in the twentieth century, it reveals how the modern global drug regime was formed by India and Turkey's navigation of the international anti-opium movement, the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, and the complex relationship between agriculture, medicine, and global capitalism.

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Since theatrical performances were rarely recorded, and many of the movies that featured all Black casts are now considered “lost films,” films for which no copy is known to survive, advertising posters often provide the only remaining evidence of the most important productions featuring Black performers between the 1870s and 1940s. These posters, and the historic innovations of playwrights, composers, directors, producers, and the Black performers behind them, are the subjects of the exhibition, Act Black: Posters From Black American Stage and Screen, curated by our guest for this episode, Assistant Curator of Collections at New York City’s Poster House museum, Es-pranza Humphrey.

Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen is on view at Poster House through September 6, 2026. Exhibition resources are also available via the Bloomberg Connects app until September 6, and at the Poster House online exhibition archive thereafter.

Es-pranza’s recommended reading list is available at the Additions to the Archive Substack.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Highlights include:

• How VA employee Maude DeVictor helped expose the effects of Agent Orange on returning veterans;

• Pilot Fred Cherry’s flight “from segregation to integration” before spending five years as the first African American prisoner of war in Vietnam;

• Art Gregg’s distinguished career in military logistics, culminating in renaming Fort Robert E. Lee in his honor (before that fort was again renamed under the Trump administration);

• The power of monuments and memorials to shape public memory and inspire future generations, as in the memorial to Henry O. Flipper, the first Black graduate of West Point, in former secretary of defense Lloyd Austin’s hometown;

• Wil’s soon-to-be legendary rendition of Marvin Gaye’s antiwar masterpiece, “What’s Going On.”

Guest: Wil Haygood is the author of ten nonfiction books, many of which have won literary awards. His book, The Butler, was made into a film directed by Lee Daniels. Haygood has been a correspondent for the Washington Post and The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2022, he received the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Peace Prize Foundation. A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Haygood is currently Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Miami University in Ohio and has recently been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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Beginning in ancient East Asia and travelling through Renaissance Europe, revolutionary Mexico, and post-Apartheid South Africa, these ten chapters celebrate the interconnected nature of the printed image and its multiple histories, while illuminating the lesser-known players who have been deliberately or erroneously overlooked. Whether formed by slicing linoleum or plunging plates into acid, then distributed via bound books or pasted posters, the print has not just replicated the world, it has shaped it.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Lee Vinsel is a professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech.

Benjamin Waterhouse is a professor of History at UNC Chapel Hill.

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"It takes women to have guts."

Deemed “the most important campaign effort ever undertaken by the wife of an American president,” the Lady Bird Special was a whistle-stop tour of the South undertaken by Lady Bird Johnson, in a bid for her husband’s reelection in 1964. Never before had a president’s spouse taken to the campaign trail so ambitiously.

The 1,682-mile trek through the southern United States, from Washington DC to New Orleans, was a deliberate choice by Lady Bird—many in the southern states resented her husband’s championing of civil rights. But the first lady, proud of her southern heritage, wanted to appeal to her fellow southerners and bridge the divide. Despite the potential danger, she pressed forward, making speeches, shaking hands, and showing herself to be confident, capable, and impressive.

You Can't Catch Us is a story of an election campaign, but it is also a story of a women-led operation and an appeal for understanding and civility. Lady Bird Johnson's exciting journey was monumental in expanding the role of women in politics and progressing the fight for women’s rights—a fight we still continue to this day.

Hosted by Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College: website here @janescimeca.bsky.social 

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The American Revolution occurred at a time when Britain's constitutional order failed to adapt to the extraordinary growth of its colonies. The framers designed an American constitution to succeed where Britain's had faltered, planning for continuous population and territorial expansion that would eventually cross the continent. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, it was already ill-suited for an increasingly urban, industrialized society, and the transformations of the twentieth century have pushed it to a breaking point. The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History (Princeton UP, 2026) charts the history and aims of the American constitution from its origins in an agrarian past to the grave crisis we face today.

Mark Peterson traces the American constitutional tradition to the control of land in medieval England, showing how the founders incorporated the aspirations of Magna Carta with the administrative principles of the Domesday Book, a meticulous survey and valuation of landed property commissioned by William the Conqueror. This framework encouraged the growth of democratic self-government in a young nation. It also institutionalized the colonization of territory and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples, establishing a legal blueprint for transforming tribal lands into revenue-yielding real estate for settlers. Peterson's riveting narrative paints an arresting picture of a dynamic republic whose frame of government has changed enormously to meet the challenges of the modern age but whose written constitution has changed very little.

Marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution reveals how this widening disconnect threatens the very existence of our democracy. It calls for a constitution that sustains the ideals developed over the past thousand years while meeting the challenges of the future.

Mark Peterson is the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 (Princeton) and The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England.

Mark Peterson traces the American constitutional tradition to the control of land in medieval England, showing how the founders incorporated the aspirations of Magna Carta with the administrative principles of the Domesday Book, a meticulous survey and valuation of landed property commissioned by William the Conqueror. This framework encouraged the growth of democratic self-government in a young nation. It also institutionalized the colonization of territory and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples, establishing a legal blueprint for transforming tribal lands into revenue-yielding real estate for settlers. Peterson’s riveting narrative paints an arresting picture of a dynamic republic whose frame of government has changed enormously to meet the challenges of the modern age but whose written constitution has changed very little.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Julia joins us today to talk about her book and her attempt to find a different approach to studying these histories: Figures like Kuala Lumpur magnate Thamboosamy Pillai, Zanzibar–Bombay matriarch Jambai, and the elusive sailor John Muhammad.

Julia Stephens is associate professor of history at Rutgers University. She is also the author of Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia (Cambridge University Press: 2018)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. You can read its review of Worldly Afterlives here. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Before Martin Luther King, Jr. was a civil rights leader, a Nobel Laureate, and a global hero, he was an emotional boy, a middling high school student devoted to fashion, dancing, and dating. Lerone A. Martin, Faculty Director of the Martin Luther King Institute at Stanford University, traces these roots to develop a fuller understanding of the influential preacher’s emotional life, his youthful confusion about his future and career direction, his teenage missteps, and his inspiration to fight for justice.

Revelatory, humanizing, and compassionate, Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. (Amistad, 2026) unearths MLK’s days as “Little Mike,” the ever-eager middle child and a precocious prankster; his early experiences of segregation and the summers he spent on a Connecticut tobacco farm, his first trip outside the Jim Crow South; his transformative time at Morehouse, playing basketball, hosting parties, studying sociology, and joining the Ministers’ Union; and his winding path to seminary, his spiritual devotion, and his relationship with Coretta, his wife-to-be.

As America undergoes another era of turmoil and change, this powerful biography—and this discussion—provides a vital roadmap for how greatness comes to light, and how history shapes a leader.

You can find Lerone Martin, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute on Facebook and Instagram.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Sophie Rose, Ph.D. (2023), is a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden University.

This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.

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One of the most divisive issues in recent progressive politics has been what role, if any, allies might legitimately play in other people's movements. Despite the significance of this debate, it has taken place in a historical vacuum.
In Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic, (Oxford UP, 2026) the Sixties historian Alice Echols explores what happened some sixty years ago when whites and Blacks came together in the fight against racism. She tells this story by focusing on two Black-led organizations that bookend the Sixties: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party. In SNCC, whites were, in part, meant to generate a "white heat" so searing it would accelerate change. Results were mixed, and white activists formed new movements, from women's liberation to draft resistance.
By 1967, the Black Panther Party was advancing its own unique brand of "revolutionary nationalism," and seeking out white supporters. Partnering with whites brought the group visibility and resources, but it also put the Panthers at odds with other Black radicals, with unfortunate consequences.
Black Power, White Heat explains how solidarity lost credibility, and not just from within the movement. Here, the FBI played a key role, and so did the discourse of "radical chic," advanced most effectively by the journalist Tom Wolfe. Still, even as Black-white solidarity lost steam, it was not entirely played out. In some of the era's most important political trials, even courtrooms became sites of solidarity as predominantly white juries returned verdicts that suggested they trusted Black Panther defendants more than the District Attorneys prosecuting them. Clear-eyed about the difficulties of solidarity, Black Power, White Heat nonetheless emphasizes the achievements and considerable promise of uniting across difference, and in ways that will inform and deepen current debates roiling progressive politics.

Alice Echols is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. She is the author of numerous books, including Daring to Be Bad, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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While Rustin certainly made some strategic mis-steps later in life, his challenges to the New Left, Black Power, and a regressing liberal establishment from 1964 until his passing in 1987 were insightful, cutting, and often quite prescient. At a time when the Left is in dire need of self-reflection and reorientation, Rustin’s work has gained a new relevance and urgency.

In a new collection of Rustin's writings from this period, Fong and Prescod gathered together articles and speeches that represent Rustin's Challenge to the Left of his day. Some of the pieces of Rustin’s writing chosen for inclusion have been published before, but only in pamphlets or newspapers from many decades ago. Some will be published for the first time here.
The volume also includes commentaries on these pieces by Adolph Reed, Jr., Jennifer Silva, Les Leopold, Mark Dudzic, Jen Pan, John-Baptiste Oduor, and many others, all contextualizing Rustin's challenge and demonstrating its continuing applicability.

Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas.

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Illumino: A History of Medieval Britain in Twelve Illuminated Manuscripts (Reaktion, 2025) explores the history of medieval Britain through the biographies of twelve remarkable illuminated manuscripts and of their creators and owners. The manuscripts each serve as portals into these lives and as springboards into the era of their production. For illuminated manuscripts are among the most intricate and fascinating forms of evidence for the Middle Ages, blending the fruits of human intellect – the arts, the sciences, politics, philosophy and faith – with the materiality of their production. By undertaking the detective work needed to determine the nature of each project and the underlying human-interest stories, this book reveals their manifold social, economic and cultural contexts and charts the exchange of ideas, techniques and materials over time and space. Featuring more than a hundred beautiful illustrations, this is a unique and accessible introduction to Britain’s history, art history and book history across a thousand years.

Michelle P. Brown is Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and was formerly Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library. Her books include Bede and the Theory of Everything (Reaktion, 2023).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here 

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But who was Imad Nuwayhid? Was he a leftist intellectual? A self-interested hotel worker? A fighter dedicated to Palestinian liberation? A tragic symbol of what happened to those caught in the crosshairs during the war? Through archival and oral history, Beirut Radical finds that Imad was none of these things alone, but all of them together.Beirut Radical: A Global Microhistory from the Sixties to the Lebanese Civil War (I.B. Tauris, 2026) takes up Imad Nuwayhid as a global microhistory-a window into the global sixties, the war, and its aftermath. Baun argues that Imad's beliefs and actions, crystalized during two tumultuous decades of the Cold War, signal a young generation of what he terms “practical radicals.” While much more is known about their politics and support for left-wing ideologies, Imad's life highlights how they pursued them, equally, alongside their career aspirations. Imad's death in the war, then, shows the twisting path by which some young leftists ceded their autonomy to liberation struggles. Lastly, Beirut Radical follows Imad's afterlife, examining how multiple actors to Lebanon's war, some in concert (party and family members), some in resistance (some family), claim individuals and their memory, during and beyond wartime. More than anything perhaps, Beirut Radical is a meditation on the intimate, the personal, the ethics, and the micro-level of history.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, racist demagoguery fomented a campaign of terror against Asian Americans. But these attacks were part of a much longer pattern that made anti-Asian racism integral to the outbreak of white supremacist, misogynist, and colonial violence across 175 years of U.S. history. Written in the radical spirit of Howard Zinn, American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism (U California Press, 2026) represents the culmination of thirty-five years of study and activism by award-winning scholar Scott Kurashige.

From the lynching of Asian immigrants during the exclusion era to the ongoing slaughter of Asian civilians by the U.S. military, the book connects domestic and global events that have been erased from the official record. Going beyond victimhood, Kurashige traces the rise of Asian American community protest and activism in response to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin and other overlooked tragedies. While many have worked to legislate and prosecute hate crimes, Kurashige argues that hope lies in grassroots activism for multiracial solidarity.

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By the fifteenth century, Constantinople had seen better days, but it was still a vibrant center of learning, worship, commerce, and information. 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople (Oxford UP, 2026) sketches the tense but exciting shared world of Italians, Turks, and Romans that was thrown into crisis by Mehmed II's decision to conquer the city. Kaldellis showcases a detailed reconstruction following events on a day-by-day basis, pulling from gripping eye-witness testimonies in Latin, Italian, Greek, Russian, and Turkish. He weighs the strategies of both the attackers and defenders, and proves that, contrary to the fatalism that marks almost all narratives written with hindsight, in reality the defense was hardly a lost cause. The defenders knew exactly what they were doing. They were willing to risk their lives, but it was not their intention to become martyrs. Instead, it was the sultan who was scrambling to neutralize a seemingly impregnable defense. That he did so was a testament to his ingenuity and tenacity.

The final chapters of 1453 trace the fate of the vanquished and their captivity. It also weighs the impact of the city's fall on the conquerors, the conquered, and on world history. 1453 was not merely a symbol for the passing of the Middle Ages and the onset of early modernity: it changed the very nature of the Ottoman empire and redirected the transmission of cultural legacies, especially those of Greek classical scholarship. The fall of Constantinople is therefore a nexus of converging pathways between east and west, medieval and modern, ends and beginnings.

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Many of the sights and sounds that Americans associate with slavery are rooted in this grandiose historical myth. The image of the Big House, sitting atop carefully manicured rolling green hills, is in large part, a fantasy, as is the idea of the plantation as an expansive family home to chivalrous planters and content slaves. Jason R. Young explores the persistence of these myths and the historical memory of slavery by focusing on the elite white mythmakers who helped shape our understanding of slavery. Examining literature, art, and performance, Young interrogates both the power and the folly of these ideas. In uncovering their origins, The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War (UNC Press, 2026) resists these racial fantasies and challenges their stubborn resurgence in our own time.

You can find Jason Young at the University of Michigan website.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Late Antiquity (ca. 250–600 CE) was a world at war: barbarian migrations, civil wars, raids, and increasingly porous frontiers affected millions of its inhabitants. While military and political historians have long grappled with this history, scholars of late antique society and culture rarely interrogate the consequences of near constant warfare on civilian populations, fighting forces, and the built environment. War and Community in Late Antiquity responds to this oversight by assembling archeologists, art historians, social historians, and scholars of religion to examine the impact of war on communities (households, cities, religious groups, elites and non-elites) and their reactions to ongoing stressors. Topics include the violence of everyday life as backdrop to that of war; the rhetoric of warfare and its significance for Christian authors; the effects of captivity and billeting on households; communal agency and the fortification of civilian spaces; and the challenges of articulating Christian imperial power in wartime.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Susanna Elm She is the Sidney H. Ehrman Professor of European History at the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Kristina Sessa is Professor of History at The Ohio State University

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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In our conversation, we discussed the way that antifascist culture undergirded the French Popular Front, the tensions between the Communists, Socialists, and Radical antifascist projects, and the ways that each Popular Front party of defined “the people.”

In The People, The Workers and the Citizens, Fitch explores Popular Front antifascist programs and the cultural work that illuminated their diverse visions for a “people’s government.” The book is thematic: in her first chapter, Fitch examines the Communists’ Maison de la Culture and the Fédération musicale populaire. The communist’s efforts to produce a worker’s culture successfully mobilized French national symbols in novel ways but had difficulties navigating between high and low culture.

By contrast, chapter 2 centres on Jean Zay and the Radicals. Zay’s influence abounded and he was willing to work with anyone in the Popular Front to see cultural access extended to all French citizens. Yet his vision of a civic nationhood clashed with his Communist and Socialist allies who privileged workers.

The most enigmatic were the Socialists. Although they were the largest party in the French National Assembly, Leon Blum’s party struggled to articulate an antifascist program that encompassed all of their voters. Their pacifism proved a problem in the context of a rising Nazi Germany, and they were squeezed between the increasing nationalism of the French Communists and the Radicals’ appeal to the working class.

Fitch’s analysis moves beyond earlier studies that focus mostly (or only) on Paris. In chapters 4 and 5, she looks at the antifascist activities of politicians in Marseille and Rouen and finds two very different Popular Fronts at work in the regions. In Marseille, working class politics dominate and an authentic endogenous Popular Front culture precedes directives from the capital. While in Rouen, extremely moderate Radicals battle working class activists on the other side of town.

Fitch’s work is compelling and shines a new light on the history of the Popular Front. It will be of interest to scholars of modern France and political culture.

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According to a mysterious pamphlet published in 1602, the Wandering Jew was a real person, named Ahasversus, who was cursed by Jesus to eternal wandering after refusing to help him as he was led to his crucifixion. For more than four hundred years, many otherwise reliable witnesses have claimed to have seen the Wandering Jew. Moving in reverse chronological order, I, Wandering Jew explores crucial episodes in the story of this figure. We meet an unforgettable, Wandering Jew-like character who appeared out of nowhere in Israel in the 1950s; a nineteenth-century novelist who was the first Jew to favorably describe the Wandering Jew; an eighteenth-century German scholar who saw the Wandering Jew emerging from a devastating fire; and the man who likely inspired the 1602 pamphlet.

A work of history that reads like a detective story, I, Wandering Jew is also part memoir. As Mintzker discovers affinities between his own story and that of the Wandering Jew, the surprising history of an old antisemitic trope and its meanings becomes a profound meditation on home and exile, Judaism and Christianity, poetry and truth, the deep past and the present.

Yair Mintzker is professor of European history at Princeton University, where he also serves as the faculty head of Yeh College. Mintzker’s work explores the Sattelzeit, the time period in German history roughly between 1750 and 1850, with books dedicated to urban history, law, intellectual history, Jewish history, and literature. A future project involves military history as well.

Born and raised in Jerusalem, Mintzker received his M.A. in history from Tel-Aviv University (2003) and his Ph.D. from Stanford (2009). His latest book combines historical research and memoir in retelling the legend of Ahasver, the Wandering Jew. Its title is I, Wandering Jew: A Five-Century History of Our Modern Condition (Princeton UP, 2026).

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A true story, The Navigator's Letter is a tale of uncanny coincidences: two friends from the same small Illinois town; both joined the Air Corps; both became navigators; both were assigned to B-24 Liberators; both flew missions over Europe; both of their planes were forced down over Ploesti; and both went missing-in-action.

Intertwined with events of WWII, the story follows the two B-24 navigators coursing through wartime, both with ties to the same woman. Their lives unfurl with the Air Force's darkest day, Operation Tidal Wave. It was the first-ever zero-altitude air raid followed by multiple high-altitude raids culminating in Operation Reunion, the largest evacuation by air in history with the Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd Fighter Group flying escort repatriating 1,162 POWs from Romania back to American air bases in Italy.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921 (Harvard University Press, 2026) is the definitive history of a government that should inspire social democrats today. Professor Stephen F. Jones chronicles how the founders of the new state navigated myriad challenges, including territorial threats from abroad, internal ethnic conflicts, and geopolitical rivalries between the imperial Ottomans, the British, and the Germans. In the midst of these existential challenges, Georgia’s social democrats set about writing a constitution to put the country on a distinctive path of genuine self-government—protecting democratic rights, promoting political pluralism, and championing equality. Professor Jones brings to life the passionate debates that shaped Georgia’s democracy during a moment of acute global instability.

The Democratic Republic of Georgia was strangled in its crib. Just four days after the constitution was ratified, the capital fell to the Red Army. Under Soviet rule, the republic was lost to history. Soviet scholars were forbidden to research this Georgian story, and Western scholars had little interest in a small and peripheral state that was independent for only three years. Recovering a forgotten experiment in democratic citizenship and statecraft, Dr. Jones reminds us of those audacious times when Georgians created and defended political freedom against the rise of Soviet communism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The book offers a new history of epidemiology by shifting focus to the people behind the data points—people who were enslaved, imprisoned, or in some circles overlooked by conventional histories of epidemiology. The book shifts across locations and empires from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century because it wants to show how the confluence of war, imperialism, and slavery really made modern epidemiology.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Read Laura's article, "Can New Media Save the Book?"

email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College.

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society.

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In his latest book, award-winning historian Samuel Clowes Huneke shows how love, queer resistance, and collective action survived in the harrowing circumstances of Nazi rule. Drawing on a decade of archival research, Huneke takes readers into a hidden world, from the wartime balls that lesbian activists continued to organize to the concentration camps where women accused of loving women were imprisoned. Following a diverse cast of characters, Huneke reveals both the oppression that queer women faced and how they resisted fascism in solidarity with one another. Arguing that this solidarity – which transcended race, class, and gender – offers a compelling alternative to today’s fractured identity politics, I Will Not Abandon You is a vital, new history of queer life under fascism and a call to rethink the foundations of progressive politics today.

Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany.

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Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

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By exploring the circumstances of Parker's rejection, this book traces how that battle laid the foundation for today's highly partisan and contentious confirmation process. The book also reintroduces Parker as a consequential but largely forgotten figure in American jurisprudence--one whose rulings helped shape the South's legal response to Brown v. Board of Education. Beyond the nomination fight, it delves into Parker's political campaigns, judicial opinions, and relationships with key public figures, charting his dramatic rise, humiliating defeat, and enduring influence.

Packed with intrigue, strategy, and the clash of competing ideologies, this is the story of how one nomination forever changed the rules of the game.

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Revolutions is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the fall of the Bastille or the storming of the Winter Palace. In reality, they take decades to burn out, if they ever do.
Historian Donald Sassoon takes the long view of some of the most famous upheavals: the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, the national uprisings that unified Italy and Germany, and the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. This is a history rich in irony and surprises. As Sassoon shows in this tour de force account, revolutions usually catch revolutionaries themselves by surprise, and the consequences are difficult to fathom at any remove. Revolutions will change how you think about the transformative moments in history, both big and small.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of how ethnic Mexicans in a relatively unknown agricultural backwater built the unprecedented movement that led to this decision. Beginning in the 1880s, David-James Gonzales details the social and economic history of Orange County, explaining how citrus capitalists, seeking increased market share and profitability, established the walls of segregation to manage ethnic Mexican family labor. By the early 1930s, ethnic Mexicans were segregated into over fifty underserved colonias and barrios. Without training or support from national civil rights organizations, they mobilized against segregation and inequality beginning in the late 1920s. Ethnic Mexican grassroots organizations proliferated throughout the county, intent on engaging in civic affairs and ending anti-Mexican discrimination and segregation. This movement, comprised of immigrants, citizens, parents, children, emerging activists, and their non-Mexican allies, paved the way for the growth of LULAC and nationwide organizing. As an essential part of the "long civil rights movement," the ethnic Mexican struggle against segregation in Orange County illustrates how minoritized groups have historically pushed US social, economic, and political institutions to live up to the nation's founding ideals.

David-James Gonzales is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements.

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Guest bio:

Nico Slate, Professor of History. Carnegie Mellon University.

References:

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: Indian social reformer, nationalist, feminist, and socialist who promoted handicrafts, handlooms, and theatre.

W.E.B. Du Bois: American sociologist, historian, and Pan-Africanist who authored some of the most consequential works on the global color line and racial capitalism.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political thinker who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule.

Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States” (2007)

Oliver Cox: Trinidadian sociologist of race relations.

B.R. Ambedkar: Indian jurist and anticaste thinker who chaired the committee that drafted the Indian Constitution and served as the independent India’s first Minister of Law.

Lala Lajpat Rai: Indian revolutionary, politician, and author.

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020)

W.E.B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1928).

Katherine Mayo, Mother India (1927).

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Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto (Princeton University Press, 2026) recounts how Greek and Roman coins became the first true international currencies. It tells how the Florentine gold florin became the "greenback of the Renaissance," and how it was succeeded by Spanish silver and a Dutch fiat currency. The book explains why the British pound dominated the international economy in the nineteenth century, why the dollar rose to the top during World War II, and why the dollar has survived predictions of the imminent loss of its preeminence since the 1970s.

The long history of international currencies shows that the same factors that encourage their widespread use eventually lead to their abandonment. Money Beyond Borders makes a powerful case that the dollar is now on the downside of this cycle, and it considers who the winners and losers will be when there is flight away from the greenback. Revealing important patterns in the life cycles of international currencies over the past 2,500 years, the book offers valuable lessons and insights about how currencies rise--and why they fall.

Barry Eichengreen is the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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We are used to speaking of the Anthropocene and the outsized impact humans have had on the planet. But we sometimes lose sight of a fundamental truth at the heart of modern world history: the legacy of human predation, slavery, and imperialism that has devastated the natural world and led us to our present moment. As historian Clifton Crais shows in this magisterial work The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (U Chicago Press, 2025), the period that we most associate with human progress—which gave us the Enlightenment, the rise of democracies, the Industrial Revolution, and more—was at the same time catastrophically destructive.
In this bracing, landmark book, Crais urges us to view the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s not as the Anthropocene, but as the Mortecene: the Killing Age. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profiteering warlords committed mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The newfound ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today.
Drawing on years of scholarship and marshaling myriad sources across world history, The Killing Age (University of Chicago Press 2025) turns our vision of past and present on its head, illuminating the Mortecene in all its horror—how it shaped who we are, what we value and fear, and the precarious present we inhabit today.

Our guest is Professor Clifton Crais, a Professor of History at Emory University

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Through a careful analysis of the ancient sources, especially Caesar's own writings, David Potter offers us a stunning and original portrait of this great general and statesman. Master of Rome: A Life of Julius Caesar (Oxford UP, 2025) reveals Caesar as a highly organized manager with an extraordinary ability to adjust to circumstances while maintaining the ancient equivalent of a positive "media presence." After his death, Caesar's followers put forward a narrative of his life that made his rise to power seem inevitable, but Caesar's own writing tells us a different story—one of a detail-oriented general who demanded a high degree of accountability from his subordinates.
A critical aspect of Caesar's philosophy of command was the need to find room for former enemies to serve in his organization. While this philosophy catapulted Caesar to great fame as a general during the wars in Gaul, when he attempted to put this method into effect in the wake of the civil war that established him as the master of Rome, it led to his brutal assassination in 44 BCE.
Master of Rome tells the dramatic story of one of history's most intriguing figures, who rose from the fringes of Roman political society to unprecedented heights. Along the way, Potter identifies the extraordinary qualities that enabled Caesar to dominate the world in which he lived.

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. His previous books include The Origin of Empire: Rome from the Republic to Hadrian, Constantine the Emperor, The Victor's Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium, and Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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In Steamships Across the Pacific: Maritime Journeys between Mexico, China, and Japan, 1867–1914 (U Hong Kong Press, 2025), Ruth Mandujano López examines this question through the lens of maritime travel. Focusing on Mexico’s participation in emerging steamship networks linking it to China and Japan, the book traces how these routes facilitated new forms of mobility, exchange, and encounter across the Pacific world.

Steamships Across the Pacific is organized around specific voyages. Each chapter centers on a particular steamship journey and follows the people who traveled on the ships and observed the locations around them, including scientific voyages and chartered steamers filled with would-be immigrants. This structure allows Mandujano López to foreground the lived experience of transpacific travel, showing how these journeys were shaped by — and also shaped — larger processes of imperialism, mobility, and modernization. As such, this book will appeal to readers interested in global history, Pacific worlds, and the history of migration and mobility.

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These individuals were not plantation workers. They served as carpenters, sailors, soldiers, canoe workers, healers, cooks, mothers, and interpreters. They built forts, repaired boats, buried the dead, and maintained trading posts.

Dr Tuck’s research demonstrates that, despite harsh conditions, Castle Slaves formed families, preserved African names, practised healing, held funerals, and resisted captivity through escape and daily acts of survival.

Women played key roles as caregivers, cultural anchors, and healers, despite facing significant vulnerability and exploitation. The book also highlights the high number of escape attempts from James Island, challenging the idea that resistance in West Africa was uncommon.

Drawing on company ledgers, punishment logs, and death records, Dr. Tuck reconstructs a world often overlooked in Atlantic history. His work emphasises that each archival entry represents a person with relationships, memories, fears, and hopes.

The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River provides both a history of slavery and a testament to resilience, community, and humanity.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands and Europe.

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Scott M. Kenworthy is Professor in the History Department at Miami University (Ohio), where he also teaches for the Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and Religious Studies programs.

Roland Clark is a Professor of Modern European History at the University of Liverpool.

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Meet the real, thinking, feeling woman that was Charlotte Brontë, as told in this biography by the surviving witnesses to her life – the clothes that she once wore.
These garments were present as she penned Jane Eyre, as she walked the cobbled streets of Haworth, and as she stood with her fiancé at the altar in the summer of 1854. Yet, until now, their testimonies had remained unheard.
Renowned Brontë scholar and dress historian Eleanor Houghton's innovative, richly illustrated biography, Charlotte Brontë's Life Through Clothes (Bloomsbury 2026), finally gives voice to the gowns, bonnets, shawls, corsets, parasols and boots that make up the novelist's wardrobe.
Secrets are revealed in their very fibres. Brontë's steel busked corset tells the story of corporate espionage and forbidden love, whilst her striped, silk dress shows how she coped with the new-found pressures of fame. When exposed to 21st century technology, a tiny sample of fabric from her 'Thackeray Dress' reveals important innovations of the Industrial Revolution going on around her and a black lace veil, worn after the deaths of her siblings, expresses how she dealt with repeated familial loss.
These clothes, some of which still bear the imprint of her foot or the sweat from her pores, prove themselves to be far more than mere celebrity curios. When 'read' alongside letters, portraits, her novels and the recollections of those who knew her well, Charlotte emerges as a woman altogether braver, more vulnerable, less isolated, less provincial, more fashion conscious than anyone ever expected. Myths are shattered, preconceptions challenged, and, the real Charlotte Brontë, beyond the famous author, finally emerges.

Eleanor Houghton is a Brontë scholar, writer and illustrator. She studied English at the University of Oxford before being awarded a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in History. In 2022, in collaboration with the Brontë Parsonage Museum, she curated a large-scale exhibition on the surviving wardrobe of Charlotte Brontë. An expert in 18th and 19th century clothing, literature and social history, she often works as consultant for film and TV, novelists and museums. Her detailed drawings are widely sold and exhibited.

Duncan McCargo is President's Chair in Global Affairs and a Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is a patron of the Brontë Birthplace in Thornton.

Alexis Wolf is a researcher of women's literary history and a lecturer at Canterbury Christchurch University. She is the author of Transnational Women Writers in the Wilmot Coterie, 1798-1840: Beyond Borders & Boundaries, Boydell Press, 2024.

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In This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich (Akashic Books, 2026), award-winning music historian Daniel Rachel navigates these turbulent waters with extraordinary delicacy and care, asking us to look anew at the artists who have defined us, inspired us, and given us joy--and consider why so many have been drawn to the imagery of a movement responsible for some of the twentieth century's worst atrocities. Rachel asks essential questions of actions often overlooked or underplayed, while neither casting sweeping judgment nor offering easy answers. In doing so, he asks us to reassess the history of rock 'n' roll, and he sheds new light on the grim echoes of the Third Reich in popular culture and the legacy of twentieth (and twenty-first) century history as it defines us today and sheds new light on the grim echoes of the Third Reich in popular culture--and the legacy of twentieth (and twenty-first)-century history as it defines us today.

Daniel Rachel is a former musician turned award-winning and best-selling author. His previous books include Too Much Too Young, the 2 Tone Records Story; Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters; and The Lost Album of the Beatles: What If the Beatles Hadn't Split Up? He has also written sleeve notes for many artists including the Kinks, Madness, Ocean Colour Scene, Ray Davies, and Bryan Ferry. He lives in London.

Daniel Rachel’s website and Instagram.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.

Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.

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At the heart of this powerful study are conjoined twins Millie Christine McKoy, born into slavery and later emancipated, and the so-called “original Siamese Twins,” Chang and Eng Bunker, who navigated the freak show circuit not only as performers but also as enslavers. Their stories reveal how archival practices surrounding enslavement and performance labor worked in tandem, creating a system where unfree and newly freed bodies were simultaneously valued and devalued—exploited for their spectacle yet rendered abject within traditional labor economies.

Blending historical analysis with innovative archival theory, Currencies of Cruelty challenges conventional narratives of labor, freedom, and human worth. A gripping exploration of race, commerce, and bodily spectacle, this book sheds crucial light on how histories of subjugation continue to shape our understanding of value and visibility today.

Author Danielle Bainbridge is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, where she also holds courtesy appointments in Performance Studies and Black Studies. You can find her at the Northwestern University website, on Instagram, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life

Our guest is: Jennifer Dasal, who is the creator and host of the ArtCurious podcast, the author of ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History. She holds an MA in art history, and is the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She lectures frequently on art both locally and nationally

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

• Artisans and Designers
• Thanks To Life
• In The Garden Behind The Moon
• Jumping Through Hoops
• Your Art Will Save Your Life
• The Artists Joy
• Speaking While Female
• My What-if Year
• We Take Our Cities With Us
• Pursuing Life Abroad

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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In this provocative new book, Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away, published by University of Hawaiʻi Press (2026), historians Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson analyse thirteen case studies of Japanese war crimes. They attempt to answer a crucial question with contemporary relevance, how does one become a war criminal?

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Kiana M. Knight is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame.  Kiana’s Webpage

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Gregory Smits is professor of history and Asian Studies at Penn State University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Early Ryukyuan History: A New Model.

Ran Zwigenberg is a professor at Pennsylvania State University.

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Ciupa situates Venezuela within not only the broader ‘Pink Tide’ that swept different parts of Latin America since the1990s, but also within the dynamics and tendencies of oil extraction and class politics at a local and international scale. Much of the literature has seen Venezuela as trapped in the classic ‘resource curse’, where oil-exporting developing countries earn windfall revenues but have been unable to translate that to sustainable growth and development, which is usually deemed to be due to poor economic planning, weak institutions, and a lack of incentives for governments to invest. Ciupa’s book argues, instead, that the interplay between national and international structures and relations of power, in Venezuela and in the global market, serve to perpetuate oil dependence. In making this argument, Ciupa presents a detailed, historical analysis of the ways in which the country was subsumed into the global economy as an oil exporter, tracing Venezuela’s development and political economy through its prior dictatorships, the crises of the twentieth century, and then finally through the revolutionary Bolivarian government led by Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro. Kristin Ciupa’s new book is a detailed, theoretically invigorated, and careful examination of Venezuela and its oil industry, which is still at the centre of geopolitical struggles more broadly today.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.

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Amid the creep of digital surveillance and the upheavals of social protest, this accessible volume The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026), containing the most harrowing revelations of the Church Committee investigation, sheds valuable light on some of today's most urgent concerns.

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The book situates paraprofessionals within broader Black and Latino struggles for economic opportunity and social justice, particularly in New York City. Juravich traces how these workers reshaped classrooms, strengthened ties between schools and communities, and helped create pathways for Black and Latino teachers in the 1970s and early 1980s. He also highlights how their organizing contributed to the growth and diversification of public-sector unions. Para Power ultimately offers a compelling look at an often overlooked workforce and its impact on education, labor, and community life.

Nicholas Juravich is an assistant professor of history and labor studies at UMass Boston, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Labor Resource Center. Previously, he was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's History at the New-York Historical Society, where he curated the exhibition Ladies' Garments, Women's Work, Women's Activism and helped develop educational workshops on school segregation and movements for educational equality in New York City. His research focuses on public education, community organizing, and public-sector unions in 20th-century U.S. cities, and has been supported by numerous foundations and institutions.

My co-host today is Jillian Felton, a graduate student in the MA program in Communication at Oakland University.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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On August 9, 2022, the Denton Independent School District held a meeting to address complaints about its libraries. Like so many districts in Texas and across the country, Denton had been responding to accusations that children had access to inappropriate books at school. During the public comment session, a local man stood up to the podium and read a sexually explicit passage from a book that he wanted removed from Denton’s school libraries. But beguiled by the prospect of securing a political win, he had confused the title of the lurid psychological thriller he read aloud with a young adult fiction series about mermaids. While his attempt to ban a book that was never in Denton’s school libraries in the first place received a few laughs, it also reflects a deeply serious and troubling culture of conflict that has taken over the politics of education and now divides people so completely as to make public education as a shared endeavor seem impossible. 

In Willing Warriors, Mark Hlavacik shows how the culture wars have redefined the politics of US schooling from the 1970s to the present through vivid accounts of public controversies featuring Allan Bloom, Oprah Winfrey, Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Betsy DeVos, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and others. Beginning in the 1970s, Hlavacik shows, efforts at innovation in schooling have increasingly been met by attempts to discredit them through exposé. As the culture wars have accelerated and exploded, this cycle of innovation and exposé has embroiled public schools in increasingly heated debates. He explains the dynamics that make curriculum controversies so intractable and confronts the delicate question of whether raucous public arguments are bad for education. With clarity and insight, Hlavacik reveals why bitter contests between educational ideologies not only add another burden for the schools, but also for the people—the willing warriors—who devote their lives to fighting for their betterment.

Mark Hlavacik is assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Assigning Blame: The Rhetoric of Education Reform.

Laura Beth Kelly is an associate professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

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In 1774, a group of elite men in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, just outside Salem, wrote an address to the royal governor thanking him for his service to the colony, even as town residents began demanding independence from Great Britain. Town meeting records reveal how the town’s patriot majority pressured the signers to withdraw their support for the governor and demanded public recantations and issued damning reports, even forcing some of the signers into exile.

Enemies to Their Country tells the story of the year following the Address, chronicling the town’s struggle to achieve consensus even as the war for American independence started. This microhistory of one vitally important town, the second largest in Massachusetts at the time, with a thriving local economy based on fishing and a robust community of religious and civically engaged citizens, complicates simplistic ideas of the American Revolution. Through compelling stories of neighboring individuals and families, many of which have not been told, it also provides an example of a politically polarized constituency struggling to find consensus at a time of great conflict.

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Cathryn J. Prince is an adjunct professor of journalism at Fordham University. Her books include Queen of the Mountaineers: The Trailblazing Life of Fanny Bullock Workman and American Daredevil: The Extraordinary Life of Richard Halliburton, the World’s First Celebrity Travel Writer

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In Dreams and Songs to Sing, McDougall writes the history of Liverpool FC from Shankly to Klopp in a register that will appeal to both popular and scholarly readers. McDougall is a lifelong Liverpool supporter, and he is careful to point out where his connections to the club and its fandom might shade his examination, but he also shows how those same affective connections allow him to a unique entry point into issues only visible to fans and that supports can be even more critical than a detached observer. This is especially true in his investigation of Heysel and Hillsborough.

The book proceeds roughly chronologically. The book’s early chapters examine the club’s connection to Liverpool’s working-class district 4 and to their Anfield home ground. He pays special attention to the supporter’s end - the notorious Kop. Using oral history interviews, McDougall illustrates the exceptional pull of the stadium to both local and global fans.

The heart of the book is its engaging, thick description of the club’s history during the Shankly era. McDougall shows that not only was Shankly a very successful manager, and quite funny, but that he ran the club with a sense of Liverpool’s local identity. A man who arrived at the right time – he benefitted from Liverpool’s growing global reputation; Beatlemania gave the city a sound but players and fans rubbed shoulders with comics, musicians, and poets.

Shankly embodied the very local socialist, working-class attitudes of the majority of club supporters. His retirement shook the whole city. McDougall uses a family repository of letters to show how people from around the city, the country, and the world wrote to him to express sadness at him leaving and to wish him luck.

McDougall’s account might be from an insider, but his analysis does not shy away from shining a light on the difficult social politics that accompanied the club’s enormous success on the field. European Cup victories sit alongside the deadly hooligan violence at Heysel. Black players like Howard Gayle and John Barnes face racism from the club’s supporters. The club first ignores and then undervalues the rise of women’s football.

McDougall’s history ends in the Klopp era – perhaps a mercy to Liverpool fans! He shows how the contemporary club embodies the idea of a global club with a local heart. The international ownership of the club has successfully navigated the rise of the Premier League and the increasing commercialization of European football, but local supporters have been innovative at creating a culture of resistance to changes that could undermine the glocal identity of Liverpool. Klopp symbolized this new football club: cosmopolitan, emotional, forward, successful.

Compelling and hard to put down, McDougall’s Dreams and Songs to Sing will appeal to all readers of sports history. It will be of particular interest to Liverpool supporters and football fanatics.

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In The Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan (U California Press, 2025), James Lin examines these questions through the example of Taiwan. In the first half of the twentieth century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, and it then attempted to export its agrarian success — the “Taiwan model” — to rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. The book looks at how these development missions portrayed Taiwan, both at home and abroad, and shows how agriculture, domestic politics, and development politics were deeply intertwined.

Rather than treating Taiwan’s postwar development as a self-contained success story, Lin reframes it as a global project shaped by Cold War geopolitics and international development regimes. As the book shows, the “Taiwan model” was actively constructed and promoted through overseas missions, beginning with early efforts such as the 1959 agricultural mission to South Vietnam and expanding through large-scale initiatives like “Operation Vanguard” in Africa. In these encounters, Taiwanese experts worked directly with rural communities, and the model itself was reshaped in local contexts. At the same time, these missions were deeply significant domestically, serving as a way for the Taiwanese state to project national strength and legitimacy in the context of diplomatic isolation.

Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Lin places Taiwan at the center of global development history and offers a new way of thinking about how models of modernization travel, as well as how “development” itself came to be understood as a technical and scientific enterprise. As such, this book will appeal to readers interested in Taiwan studies, global history, and development studies.

A free ebook version of this title is also available through Luminos, the University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program.

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Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore.

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Winner of the 2011 Kulczycki Book Prize for Polish Studies, and the Pro Historia Polonorum Prize for the best book on the history of Poland published in a foreign language between 2007 and 2011.

This book talk originally took place on October 22, 2013

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Drawing on the extraordinary archive of the Cairo Geniza, Perry reconstructs a hidden world of enslaved people, merchants, and households in medieval Egypt. These fragments—letters, contracts, and legal questions preserved for centuries in a synagogue—reveal how slavery shaped Jewish and Islamic society at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds.

From global slave trading networks that stretched from Europe and Africa to India, to the intimate spaces of kitchens and courtyards, Perry uncovers how enslaved people lived, labored, resisted, and sometimes entered Jewish communities after gaining their freedom. The story even reframes familiar rituals: medieval Jewish children could look around the Passover table and see slavery embodied in the people serving the meal.

Together, Perry and Katz explore how this overlooked history forces us to rethink medieval Jewish life, the social realities behind religious texts, and the complex entanglements of Jews with the broader Arab-Islamic world.

About the Guest

Craig Perry is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. A specialist in the social and economic history of the medieval Middle East, his research focuses on slavery, law, and everyday life in Jewish and Islamic societies. He also is the editor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500 – AD 1420.

About the Host

Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud, including Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Through his writing, teaching, and podcast conversations with scholars and public thinkers, Katz brings cutting-edge scholarship into dialogue with contemporary Jewish life.

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Each chapter is a self-contained adventure into history, etymology, politics and more, but will also contribute to a general appreciation for how our alphabet developed, how it has changed and how it fits into a wider world of writing.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought at The University of Queensland. A noted authority in the history of religion and of ideas, he has written many books on subjects as diverse as God, the Devil, the afterlife, witchcraft and witches, Adam and Eve, heaven and hell in Enlightenment England, and early modern demonic possession. His recent works include The Buddha: Life and Afterlife Between East and West (2024), Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History (2023), and The Antichrist: A New Biography (2020), all published by Cambridge University Press.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

Twitter: here

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The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America (Columbia UP, 2026) by Dr. Karima Moyer-Nocchi is a delectable history of macaroni and cheese, tracing an extraordinary journey of cultural exchange and social change. Karima Moyer-Nocchi reveals the religious, political, and industrial forces that shaped its evolution alongside stories of the unsung figures who crafted the dish as we know it today: enslaved cooks who preserved and adapted traditions, immigrant chefs who introduced new variations, and practical homemakers looking to nourish their families with an affordable meal. She emphasizes the adaptability of macaroni and cheese, which in different times has served as both an indulgence on the elite table and sustenance to those struggling to survive, crossing borders, social classes, and cultural divides. Deeply researched and rich with enticing details, this book uncovers the creativity and resilience that brought a beloved food to our tables. The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese also shares centuries of recipes—from ancient Roman authors to celebrity chefs, reworked for modern kitchens—that provide a hands-on way to experience the evolution of this iconic dish.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts

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In Why Barbarossa Failed: Germany and Russia in the Second World War (Helion and Company, 2026), Timothy Manion offers a bold, deeply researched re-examination of the most consequential campaign of the Second World War. Going far beyond the well-worn clichés of “General Winter” and German hubris, Manion places the story in a much longer arc: the evolution of military thought from the age of Napoleon through the catastrophe of 1914–18 and into the highly mechanised, manoeuvre-driven doctrines championed by both Germany and the Soviet Union in the interwar period.

Drawing upon a vast range of previously overlooked archival records, Manion demonstrates that both armies entered the war expecting a rapid, decisive campaign — a return to war between generals, not economies. Early German successes seemed to prove them right. But as Manion reveals, the Wehrmacht’s apparent mastery of mobile warfare concealed profound flaws in decision-making, command structure and operational logic. Meanwhile, the Red Army —though battered — adapted faster and more its opponent understood.

The result is a compelling challenge to the established consensus. Manion argues that Barbarossa did not collapse under the weight of numbers alone: German generalship and operational misjudgement played a far larger part than most accounts allow, while Soviet resilience and strategic learning proved decisive long before Stalingrad.

Rich with analytical clarity, packed with detailed campaign studies, and supported by an extensive set of newly published archival maps and figures, Why Barbarossa Failed is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only how the 1941 campaign unfolded — but why its outcome shaped the entire course of the war.

This is the story of two armies, two visions of modern warfare — and the decision points that sealed the fate of the Eastern Front.
Timothy Manion earned dual degrees in mathematics and economics from Boston University. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Manion represented global financial institutions on Wall Street as outside counsel. Not satisfied with traditional explanations for the failure of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Manion has undertaken an extensive investigation of the German and Soviet archives. The results of his study overturn the historical consensus on the campaign and are published here for the first time.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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In our discussion we discuss the formation and activity of the Dillingham Commission. This includes discussing a number of key figures, such as Franz Boas who measures skulls for the commission and in so doing uses the same tools of the eugenicists and positivists to undercut their racist claims and Yamato Ichihashi who, while vociferously making the case that Japanese migrants such as himself are the ideal ‘Americans’ ends up being an example of the ‘insurmountable difference’ placed in front of such groups. We end by discussing how Zora Neale Hurston, once Boas’s student, provides a different way of conceiving of race and its place in immigration debates.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts.

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A.J. Bauer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama.

You can find a transcript of the interview here.

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In Edinburgh: A New History (Birlinn, 2024) Alistair Moffat explores these themes and many more, showing how the city has grown, changed and adapted over the centuries. He introduces Edinburgh’s famous places and people – including monarchs, murderers, writers and philosophers – as well as the ordinary citizens who have contributed so much to the life of one of the world’s best-known and most beautiful cites.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Stuart Jones is professor of intellectual history at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The French State in Question: Public Law and Political Argument in the Third Republic, Victorian Political Thought, and Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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Author Antwain K. Hunter is a historian of slavery and freedom in North America, with a current focus on the Carolinas. A Precarious Balance is his first book.

Find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Antwain continued their conversation.

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Ethelene Whitmire is a respected historian and professor for the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research has won awards and funding from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the American Library Association, and she has been invited to writers residencies including Yaddo, UCross, Hedgebrook, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). She is currently working on the book Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism. 

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There are turbines on the horizon. The blades whirl with metronomic rhythm. With each rotation, wind is transformed into electricity. An energy revolution is underway. Electric wind rewinds to the beginning to explore the rise of wind energy in modern Britain. From the industrial revolution to the aftermath of war, through energy crises and the changing politics of the late twentieth century, we see how energy has shaped a nation - and how a nation is reflected and refracted through energy. Boldly charting Britain through its wildest, windiest places, this book takes us to the edges of land and beyond to think deeply about the role of nature in politics, science and technology. Visionaries and hippies join engineers and entrepreneurs. Traditions and local cultures meet infrastructure and industry in this captivating history.

At a time when action on carbon emissions is urgent, Electric wind offers examples, ideas and stories to fuel change going forwards. This book is an essential read for anyone interested in nature, climate change, landscape and the making of modern Britain.

Marianna Dudley is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol. She is the author of An Environmental History of the UK Defence Estate (2012).

Filippo De Chirico is a Ph.D. Candidate in Energy History at Roma Tre University (Italy). His research focuses on the history of the Italian natural gas sector. 

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Manuela Ceballos is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca.

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As Spanish conquistadors swept through the New World, the Crown envisioned that a rigidly hierarchical aristocratic order would flourish in their wake. At first, this vision seemed to be within reach: the great conquistadors ruled as noblemen over millions. Yet contrary to all expectations, the Spanish empire in the New World quickly became a hotbed of radical efforts to overturn the emerging order. With the conquistadors in retreat, new enclaves controlled by powerful friars and native lords arose. But they too collapsed, again to the surprise of many.

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Jessica Clarke is a historian and archaeologist specialising in ancient Roman theatre and entertainment culture. She was awarded her PhD by University College London in 2024.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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 Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day laborers and slaves. She finds working people producing a consumer revolution, making and buying all manner of goods from fine pottery to children’s toys. Many of the poorest working people probably pieced together a living from multiple sources of income, including wages. And she suggests that Romans’ most daunting challenge was the struggle to save. Like many modern people, saving enough to buy land or start a business was a slow, precarious slog. Bowes shows how these economies of survival were shared by a wide swath of the populace, blurring the lines between genders, ages, and legal status.
Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today’s laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world.

Kim Bowes is professor of archaeology and ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire and Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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In The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North (FSG Press, 2025), the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight—and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate—and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today.

Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country’s promise.

Guest: Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. The former codirector of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she served on the Biden administration’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States and as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and other publications. She was born and grew up in Detroit.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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Drawing on his recent PhD dissertation, “‘Liberation’ in Augustan Propaganda” (2025), we discuss the fall of the Roman Republic, the empire that Caesar Augustus forged, as well as the other fascinating figures in this story, from Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony to Brutus and Cicero.

The transcript for this interview will be available on our new Substack page. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

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Towards a Godless Dominion: Unbelief in Interwar Canada by Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), explores both anti-religious activism and the organized opposition unbelievers faced from Christian Canada during the interwar period. Despite Christianity’s prominence, anti-religious ideas were propagated by lectures in theatres, through newspapers, and out on the streets. Secularist groups in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver actively tried to win people away from religious belief. Looking at interwar controversies around religion, Hanowski shows how unbelievers were able to use these conflicts to get their skeptical message across to the public. Challenging the stereotype of Canada as a tolerant, secular nation, Towards a Godless Dominion returns to a time when intolerant forms of Christianity ruled a country that was considered more religious than the United States.

Dr. Elliot Hanowski is an academic librarian at the University of Manitoba with a doctorate in Canadian history and one of the founders of the International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism, and Humanism. His research focuses specifically on the history of unbelief in Canada.

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But what if that history is wrong?

In The Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island (Bloomsbury, 2025), archeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island’s downfall. Relying on the latest archaeological findings, he paints a vastly different portrait of what life was like on the island before the first Europeans arrived, investigating why a Polynesian people who succeeded for centuries throughout the South Pacific supposedly failed to thrive in Rapa Nui. Pitts also unearths the vital story of one of the first anthropologists to study Rapa Nui, an Oxford-trained iconoclast named Katherine Routledge, who was instrumental in collecting firsthand accounts from the Polynesians living on Rapa Nui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though Routledge’s impressive scholarship captured the oral traditions of what life had been like pre-1722, her work was widely dismissed because of her gender, her reliance on indigenous perspectives, and her conclusions which contradicted her historical peers.

A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history’s true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies.

Mike Pitts is a writer and broadcaster, archaeologist and former museum curator. His books include A Fairweather Eden: Excavations at Boxgrove, Hengeworld, Digging for Richard III, Digging up Britain, and How to Build Stonehenge. He has also written for almost all of the important British newspapers - the Guardian, Observer, Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph, New Scientist, BBC History Magazine, Spectator and other papers and magazines - and conduct original research and publish in peer-reviewed journals. He also edited British Archaeology magazine for 20 years and is a Fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

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In The Long Death of Adolf Hitler: An Investigative History (Yale University Press, 2026) Dr. Caroline Sharples explores the aftermath of events at the Führerbunker in the first cultural account of this decisive yet elusive moment. Hitler’s death was widely anticipated, and the news elicited a huge range of emotions as governments and secret services scrambled to verify what they heard. The search for proof of death led to an outpouring of conspiratorial thinking, and the final moments of Hitler’s life have been reimagined ever since.

This is an intriguing, unsettling account of a historical event we all think we know—and a sophisticated examination of how history is written.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Guest Dr. Maud Bracke is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, and is also the author of Which Socialism? Whose Detente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 in 2007 and Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy (1968-1983) in 2014, as well as the co-editor of Translating Feminism: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Text, Place and Agency in 2021. In addition to authoring numerous journal articles and book chapters and co-editing several special issues of academic journalsb she is also an editor at the Journal of Modern European History and sits on various other editorial boards. 

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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Karen Dubinsky is Professor of History at Queens University in Canada.

Katie Coldiron is Latin American & Caribbean Studies Librarian at Florida International University.

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Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition.

In the 1970s and ’80s, cities across the country elected black mayors for the first time. Just as these officials gained political power, however, their cities felt the full brunt of white flight and deindustrialization. Tasked with governing cities in crisis, black political leaders responded in seemingly conservative ways to the social problems that austerity worsened. Nowhere was this response more evident than in Atlanta. In the nation’s preeminent black urban regime, black leaders such as mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young employed the power of policing and the private sector to discipline black Atlantans, hoping they would equip vulnerable communities with the tools to manage the volatility of the era.

Danielle Wiggins shows that these punitive responses to the problems of crime, family instability, and unemployment were informed by black liberalism’s disciplinary impulse: an enduring tendency to reform behaviors believed to threaten black survival in a white supremacist nation. Forged in response to the violence of Jim Crow, the disciplinary impulse relied upon notions of pathology and its inverse, black excellence. Wiggins identifies several black liberal efforts to cultivate excellent black communities, families, and workers in the post–civil rights era, including community policing, corporate-sponsored family initiatives, and black entrepreneurship.

In embracing disciplinary strategies, however, black liberals often focused on behavior at the expense of addressing structural inequality. Consequently, their approaches dovetailed with those of the “New” Democrats, whose post–Great Society social policies were informed by urban black liberals. Black Excellence reveals thus how urban black liberals not only reshaped black politics but, as Democrats, also helped build the neoliberal Democratic Party.

Guest: Danielle Wiggins is an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on U.S. and African American history since the 1960s. She is currently researching race and the politics of energy since the 1960s. Focusing on the 1970s energy crisis, her project will explore how black Americans thought about energy, consumption, growth, and sustainability in ways that alternately challenged, intersected with, and radically rethought mainstream energy discourses.

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China became a capitalist superpower by investing in globalization. Now that it has established its credentials—and emerged as a major US competitor—its leaders are looking within, focused on suppressing dissent and fostering cohesion. The result has been an increasingly nationalist cultural agenda, celebrating a Chinese identity steeped in the mystique of the Middle Kingdom and nostalgia for heroic twentieth-century resistance. Yet Chinese nationalism, like nationalism everywhere, is fraught. Few Westerners, and even fewer Chinese, recognize that the very idea of China is up for grabs. 

Xu Guoqi is the founding director of the Institute of Transnational History of China at the University of Hong Kong, and author of The Idea of China: A Contested History (Harvard UP, 2026)

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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In the national imaginary, America’s amber fields of grain lie in the country’s center, but for more than a century, they also grew across one pocket of the South: North Texas. From the 1840s to the 1970s, the state's agriculture, dominated in lore by cotton in the east and livestock in the open range, was heavily invested in the cultivation, processing, sale, and consumption of wheat. Recalling a forgotten history, Rebecca Sharpless shows how the rhythms of the wheat harvest—and the evolution of the milling, distribution, and baking industries—governed daily life in what is now known as the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex.

In the 1840s, Anglo settlers discovered that grain flourished in North Texas and quickly built an economy that included wheat in fields, mills, and kitchens. After the Civil War, hand labor gave way to mechanization, greatly increasing production. Commercial bakeries churned out novel confections, and big cities were built on the bounty of the countryside. In the second half of the twentieth century, as production moved northward, industrial milling and baking declined, but home baking boomed, flour advertising supported regional music, and wheat fortunes financed the region’s cultural life. Sharpless covers 150 years of wheat’s very human history and shows how the labor that cultivated it, the sustenance it provided, and the prosperity it generated left an indelible mark on the people and institutions of Texas.

Dr. Rebecca Sharpless is a Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She specializes in Gender & Sexuality, Texas History, and American History. She is the author of three previous books: Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South (2022); Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (2010); and Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 (1999).

Dr. Scott Catey is founder of The Catey Creative Group, LLC. and host of the podcast The Sum of All Wisdom. Website here

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Vents come in a wonderful and inventive variety of forms. Adventurous Vents: A Journey through the Ventilation Shafts of Britain (Penguin, 2025) by Lucy Lavers, Judy Ovens, Suzanna Prizeman celebrates them both in their own right as intriguing individual structures, and as an innovative way to tell the story of Britain's subterranean industrial development from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Here are one hundred of the most interesting ventilation shafts, dotted around Britain, sometimes in the most surprising places. You'll find them masquerading as sculptures and small buildings, adorned with fine details or displaying their purpose with confidence.

Whether you're inspired to take off in search of them, or just to admire them from your armchair, vents are fabulous objects. By putting them – perhaps for the very first time – centre-stage,

Adventurous Vents celebrates a highly unusual but exciting architectural form.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin (W. W. Norton & Co, 2025)journalist Daniel Brook retraces Hirschfeld's rollicking life and reinvigorates his legacy, recovering one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In an era when gay sex was a crime and gender roles rigid, Hirschfeld taught that each of us is their own unique mixture of masculinity and femininity. Through his public advocacy for gay rights and his private counseling of patients toward self-acceptance, he became the intellectual impresario of Berlin's cabaret scene and helped turn his hometown into the world's queer capital. But he also enraged the Nazis, who ransacked his Institute for Sexual Science and burned his books.

Driven from his homeland, Hirschfeld traveled to America, Asia, and the Middle East to research sexuality on a global scale. Through his harrowing lived experience of antisemitic persecution and a pivotal late-in-life interracial romance, he came to see that race, like gender, was a human invention. Hirschfeld spent his final years in exile trying to warn the world of the genocidal dangers of racism.

Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany.

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This book describes the struggle between the computing technologies that archive data and the cultures of information that have led to platforms that assert control over its use. Acker examines the origins of data archives and the computing processes of storage, exchange, and transmission. Each chapter introduces data archiving processes that relate to the evolution of data sovereignty we experience today: from magnetic tape and timesharing computer models from the 1950s, to the establishment of data banks and the rise of database processing and managed data silos in the 1970s, to file structures and virtual containers in cloud-based information services over the past 40 years.

Your host is Dr. Adam Kriesberg, Associate Professor at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science.

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Major League Baseball owners and executives masked exclusion and division by touting the game’s accessibility and instituting few overtly discriminatory policies. Affluent white males enjoyed a comfortable, safe space that reinforced their status as the prototypical American citizen. At the same time, ballparks relocated in response to how these favored fans felt about cities. Tannenbaum traces this journey from the urban locales of the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium through the suburban-oriented Dodger Stadium and Houston Astrodome to the cloistered fantasy of city life offered by Camden Yards. As he shows, owners’ pursuit of greater profits incorporated existing barriers that helped shape the structure of modern parks.

A revealing social history, Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark (U Illinois Press, 2026) revises the persistent myth of the ballpark as an egalitarian melting pot.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, is now available. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War (Oxford UP, 2025) describes how, faced with this immense challenge, the Allies devised a multilateral institution--the Wheat Executive--to do what no state could do alone. Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Paul Poast examine the difficult considerations made by the allied powers when ceding authority to an international body that would make decisions for them. Beyond successfully managing wheat shipping and distribution, they argue, the Wheat Executive proved to have significant influence in the evolving landscape of interstate cooperation. As a case study, the Wheat Executive improves our understanding of international institutional design, the importance of commodities during wartime, economic coordination amongst wartime coalition members, and the legacies of international cooperation during the First World War. As one of the first great experiments in supranationalism, the Allies' management of wheat while at war provides lessons about the emergence of international organizations and their contours.

Jobie Turner is a military historian who studies logistics in warfare.  His most recent work is Feeding Victory:  Innovative Logistics from Lake George to Khe Sanh, 1755-1968 which discuss the impact of technology on transportation across three centuries of warfare.  Jobie is a retired Colonel in the USAF and a pilot for United Airlines

email: here 

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Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. E. T. Dailey presents a new interpretation of this remarkable woman, examining her vibrant life and legacy. Dr. Dailey shows how she succeeded in establishing a place for herself within this difficult and dangerous world, despite the trials she faced. He also demonstrates how Radegund achieved a position of prominence as a woman in a foreign land without resorting to the violence and intrigue that characterized the lives of other prominent women during this period. Based on a wealth of English, French, and German scholarship, this book will equip experts and lay readers with a concise, authoritative, and accessible portrait of Radegund.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Donaghy explains why the Cold War intensified so quickly and how - contrary to all expectations - US-Soviet relations were repaired. Drawing on recently declassified archival material, The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2021) traces how each administration evolved in response to crises and events at home and abroad. This compelling and controversial account challenges the accepted notion of how the end of the Cold War began.

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On this background, Christine Loh’s book Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong(Hong Kong University Press, 2018) is an indispensable guide to the Party's approaches to Hong Kong over time. As a former-lawmaker in the city’s Legislative Council, founder of the think tank Civic Exchange, and many other things, Loh makes the most of her unique vantage point on contemporary CCP affairs, as well her invaluable access to insights from the her hometown's colonial past. This book sets its analysis of how the Party seeks to maintain supremacy in Hong Kong within all-important historical context, and consequently will be a vital resource for anyone wishing to understand the questions of political culture, power and influence which are pivotal to the future of East Asia and the world at large.

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Elisa Prosperetti is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African history at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at: www.elisaprosperetti.net.

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Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011).

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Indeed the “shtetl” meant many things to many people. For many Zionists and Jewish leftists, the shtetl was a pathetic symbol of Jewish backwardness. Others cherished it as a place of real Jewishness, that fixed point that gave Jews in the diaspora the feeling of being home. The destruction of the Holocaust encouraged this nostalgia for the lost shtetl, especially as many Jews in the post-war world, newly comfortable and secure in their new homes, showed a new interest in their ethnic roots.

In this lecture, YIVO Visiting Research Historian Samuel Kassow will explore the “real shtetl” and the “imagined shtetl,” which both formed an integral part of Eastern European Jewish peoplehood.

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director and CEO of YIVO.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Profile here

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Freddy Domínguez is a Historian or early modern European history at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville. He is the author of Radicals in Exile (2020), Bob Dylan in the Attic (2022), and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (2025). He is also co-editor with William Bulman of Political and Religious Practice in the Early Modern British World (2022). Website here

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According to Andrea Mansker, the changes in age and divorce policy, combined with increased mobility and changing social patterns in Paris, encouraged young people across classes to demand more freedom in spouse selection, leading Claude Viome to market his services as a way to bypass traditional family negotiations in courtship. The book relates the1804 Civil Code, explaining how it preserved revolutionary reforms like equality before the law but restored traditional family structures by treating married women and children as legal minors under their husband's authority. It exposes how divorce became less common and eventually outlawed in 1816, and detailed the French Supreme Court's 1855 ruling against matchmaker contracts, which viewed marriage as a sacred agreement distinct from commercial transactions. 

Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ | LinkedIn here | ORCID here | Meta here |

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In Patriots & Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) Lillian Guerra excavates the rise of a Soviet-advised Communist culture controlled by state institutions and the creation of a multidimensional system of state security whose functions embedded themselves into daily activities and individual consciousness and reinforced these binaries. But despite public performance of patriotism, the life experience of many Cubans was somewhere in between. Guerra explores these in-between spaces and looks at Cuban citizens’ complicity with authoritarianism, leaders’ exploitation of an earnest anti-imperialist nationalism, and the duality of an existence that contains elements of both support and betrayal of a nation and of an ideology.

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Cyril Welch is professor emeritus of philosophy at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada.

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High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (UNC Press, 2023) charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers. Scorned by the record industry for "killing music," the cassette tape rippled through scenes corporations couldn't control. For so many, tapes meant freedom--to create, to invent, to connect.

Marc Masters introduces readers to the tape artists who thrive underground; concert tapers who trade bootlegs; mixtape makers who send messages with cassettes; tape hunters who rescue forgotten sounds; and today's labels, which reject streaming and sell music on cassette. Their stories celebrate the cassette tape as dangerous, vital, and radical.

Marc Masters is a music journalist whose work has appeared on NPR and in the Washington Post, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Bandcamp Daily. He is also the author of No Wave. Marc Masters on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Yet few people then or since encountered the "real" Walter Lippmann. That was because he kept crucial parts of himself hiding in plain sight. His extensive commentary on politics and diplomacy was bounded by his sense that America had to adjust to the loss of a common faith and morality in a "post-Christian" era. Over the course of his life, Lippmann traded in his fame as a happy secularist for the stardom of a grumpy Western Christian intellectual. Yet he never committed himself to any religious system, especially his own Jewish heritage.

Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor (Oxford University Press, 2023) considers the role of religions in Lippmann's life and thought, prioritizing his affirmation and rejection of Christian nationalisms of the left and right. It also yields fresh insights into the philosophical origins of modern American liberalism, including liberalism's blind spots in the areas of sex, race, and class. But most importantly, this biography highlights the constructive power of doubt. For Lippmann, the good life in the good society was lived in irreconcilable tension: the struggle to be free from yet loyal to a way of life; to recognize the dangers yet also the necessity of civil religion; and to strive for a just and enduring world order that can never be. In the end, Lippmann manufactured himself as the prophet of limitation for an extravagant American Century.

Mark Thomas Edwards is professor of US history and politics at Spring Arbor University in Michigan.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Sally Low’s pioneering study, Colonial Law Making: Cambodia under the French (NUS Press, 2023), tells the story of the encounter between what she calls two different legal and social ‘cosmologies’: Cambodia’s indigenous legal tradition and modern French legal thinking. While the French claimed they were modernizing Cambodian law, in fact they imposed many elements of French law. Initially, they dispossessed the king of much of his judicial authority. But ironically, the French reform of Cambodian law retained the monarchy as the semi-divine source of law, and royal power was subsequently legally embedded into new national institutions, the law, and the constitutions. At independence in 1953, 90 years after the French began their protectorate, Cambodia’s King Sihanouk inherited this legal apparatus which had done so much to enhance the power of the executive over the judiciary.

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.

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Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter.

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In this theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich book, Jie-Hyun Lim offers a new way to understand nationalism and its political instrumentalization of suffering, developing the concept of “victimhood nationalism” and exploring it in a range of global settings. Victimhood Nationalism: History and Memory in a Global Age (Columbia UP, 2025) examines relations among Poland, Germany, Israel, Korea, and Japan, focusing on how memories of colonialism, the Holocaust, and Stalinist terror have converged and intertwined in transnational spaces. With an emphasis on memory formation, Lim scrutinizes how perpetrators in Germany and Japan transformed themselves into victims, as well as how nationalists in Poland, Korea, and Israel portray themselves as hereditary victims in order to rebut external criticism. He considers the construction of nations as victims and perpetrators, tracing the interaction of history and memory. Ultimately, the book contends, challenging victimhood nationalism is necessary to overcome the endless competition over national suffering and instead promote reconciliation, mutual understanding, and transnational solidarity.

Dr. Jie-Hyun Lim is the CIPSH Chairholder of Global Easts, Distinguished Professor, and founding director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University. In 2025–2026, he is the Class of 1955 Visiting Professor in Global Studies at Williams College. His many books include Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing (Columbia, 2022).

Visit the Critical Global Studies Institute’s homepage: here

Buy Victimhood Nationalism: History and Memory in a Global Age: here

About the host: Leslie Hickman is an Anthropology graduate student at Emory University. She has an MA in Korean Studies and a KO-EN translation certificate from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. You can contact her at leslie.hickman@emory.edu

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Vladimir Putin cuts off no beards, he is no moderniser; the fall of the Berlin Wall left him with an abiding mistrust of democracy and ‘People’s Power’. At Davos in 2000, American journalist Trudy Rubin asked a panel of top Russian officials: ‘Who is Mr Putin?’ None of them could answer, except to say: ‘He is the President of Russia.’ How did this KGB foreign intelligence officer become (temporarily) Trump’s favourite running dog of capitalism? To answer the question, we have to understand what Russia was. There is a continuity that will give us a clue about what it is and will become.

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Ray Yep is research director of the Hong Kong History Centre, University of Bristol.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.

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David Frankfurter holds the William Goodwin Aurelio Chair of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University. He joined the faculty of B.U. in the fall of 2010. A scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions with specialties in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, magical texts, popular religion, and Egypt in the Roman and late antique periods, Frankfurter’s particular interests revolve around theoretical issues like the place of magic in religion, the relationship of religion and violence, the nature of Christianization, and the representation of evil in culture. 

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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A Four-Eyed World: How Glasses Changed the Way We See (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the first book to investigate the experience of wearing glasses and contacts and their role in culture. Dr. David King Dunaway encourages readers to take a look at how they literally see the world through what they wear. He explores everything from the history of deficient eyesight and how glasses are made to portrayals of those who wear glasses in media, the stigma surrounding them, and the future of augmented and virtual reality glasses, highlighting how glasses have shaped, and continue to shape, who we are. Interwoven is Dr. Dunaway’s own experience of spending a week without his glasses, which he has used since childhood, to see the world around him and his newfound appreciation for his visual aids.

This is the story of how we see the world and how our ability to see things has evolved, ultimately asking: How have two cloudy, quarter-sized discs of crystal or glass originally riveted together become so essential to human existence? Shakespeare famously said eyes are windows to the soul, but what about people who see only by covering theirs with glasses? Readers will find out together through this fascinating and insightful cultural history of one of humanity’s greatest inventions.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Out of the Ballpark: How to Think about Baseball (Oxford University Press, 2026) reconsiders the character, meaning, and delights of the game by exploring both baseball's unusual features and the sport's many resonances with other aspects of modern life. To this end, it abandons several assumptions and mythologies that underlie most approaches to histories of baseball: that it is unique among sports and fundamentally different from other kinds of entertainment; that it is specific to the United States; that it has changed fundamentally in recent years; and that the keys to understanding it lie primarily in examining what happens on the field of play.

Instead, David M. Henkin moves across time and space to examine baseball's history since the nineteenth century and beyond US borders. He takes readers inside the structures of clubs and leagues, interprets the sacred scripture of rulebooks, and illuminates some of baseball's rites and rituals that are often associated with honor and manhood. He charts baseball's significance along the routes of American and Japanese imperial expansion and the shifting maps of race and ethnicity in the US. Baseball is found at negotiating tables that pit capital against labor and in pivotal moments in the history of mass media. Here, we are shown how baseball might offer a complex and capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world.

David M. Henkin is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught courses on society and culture in nineteenth-century America for close to three decades.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways.

Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026) illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building.

This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.

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Despite epidemic levels of overdoses in the United States, by 2020, only twenty percent of Americans suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD) received medication-assisted treatment (MAT), the gold standard of addiction treatment, which uses methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone to reduce illicit drug use and curb the symptoms of withdrawal. While MAT is the most effective treatment available for OUD, it's also the most controversial, the most expensive, and the most difficult to access. And yet, the medications at the center of this treatment--and the private industries that distribute them--generate roughly sixteen billion dollars each year, on par with national sales of coffee and pet food.

In Addiction, Inc: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, historian Emily Dufton explains how this promising avenue of treatment emerged during President Richard Nixon's war on drugs in 1971 as a radical experiment in public health, when hundreds of federally-funded treatment clinics opened nationwide. Dufton then explores how these nationalized clinics gave way to an immensely profitable private industry that offers poor care at high costs to an insufficient number of people. Drawing on original research and over a hundred interviews with policymakers, medical experts, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and patients and their families, she tells a gripping story of squandered potential and missed opportunities, as MAT transformed from a revolutionary political project launched from the White House itself into a commercial success--and a public health disaster.

Urgent, eye-opening, and deeply human, Addiction, Inc. reveals how, over the past fifty years, the United States built an addiction treatment system that made recovery harder instead of easier, and what it will take to change its course.

Despite epidemic levels of overdoses in the United States, by 2020, only twenty percent of Americans suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD) received medication-assisted treatment (MAT), the gold standard of addiction treatment, which uses methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone to reduce illicit drug use and curb the symptoms of withdrawal. While MAT is the most effective treatment available for OUD, it's also the most controversial, the most expensive, and the most difficult to access. And yet, the medications at the center of this treatment--and the private industries that distribute them--generate roughly sixteen billion dollars each year, on par with national sales of coffee and pet food.

In Addiction, Inc., historian Emily Dufton explains how this promising avenue of treatment emerged during President Richard Nixon's war on drugs in 1971 as a radical experiment in public health, when hundreds of federally-funded treatment clinics opened nationwide. Dufton then explores how these nationalized clinics gave way to an immensely profitable private industry that offers poor care at high costs to an insufficient number of people. Drawing on original research and over a hundred interviews with policymakers, medical experts, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and patients and their families, she tells a gripping story of squandered potential and missed opportunities, as MAT transformed from a revolutionary political project launched from the White House itself into a commercial success--and a public health disaster.

Urgent, eye-opening, and deeply human, Addiction, Inc. reveals how, over the past fifty years, the United States built an addiction treatment system that made recovery harder instead of easier, and what it will take to change its course.

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Craig Gill is a writer, researcher and historian based in Vancouver, BC. He is the author of Caddying on the Color Line, a history of African American golf caddies in the U.S. South.

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Thanks to archaeological excavations, we now know that the borders of the empires we consider the 'heart' of civilization were in fact thriving, vibrant cultures – just not ones we might expect. This is where the boundaries of 'civilized' and 'barbarians' began to dissipate; where the rules didn't always apply; where normally juxtaposed cultures intermarried; and where nomadic tribes built their own cities.

In this episode, Owen Rees joins me to discuss his book The Far Edges of the Known World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2025) and his research into what ‘everyday’ life looked like beyond the Athenian or Roman heartlands. Covering over 6,000 years of history on three continents, the book encourages readers to interrogate misconceptions about the ancient world and to understand its enormous diversity of lived experiences.

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In 1933, the government issued the Teachers Schools Regulations, mandating that all teachers schools be state-run. However, the Nationalists viewed private Muslim teachers schools as valuable allies in their efforts to assert influence in China’s Muslim-dominated northwestern frontier region and deliberately refrained from enforcing the 1933 Teachers Schools Regulations on them. Instead, the government applied the 1933 Amended Private Schools Regulations, which did not specifically address teachers schools, to govern Muslim teachers schools. By charting the evolving dynamics between the Nationalist state and Chinese Hui Muslims, Hui Muslims in the Shaping of Modern China: Education, Frontier Politics, and Nation-State (Routledge, 2025) reevaluates the Hui Muslims’ role in shaping modern China.

Offering crucial context on the role of Islam in modern China, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of Chinese history, as well as for policymakers and journalists interested in religion in China.

Bin Chen is Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He received his PhD from Pennsylvania State University, and his research interests include China’s modern transition and Islam in China. His publications have appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Modern Chinese History, International Journal of Asian Studies, and others.

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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A German Jew’s Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany (McFarland, 2025) is based on primary sources such as Fritz’s contemporaneous World War I diaries, journals kept by his wife, Elsbeth, and a copious collection of letters he wrote to her during their long separations. After 9/11, Harry Handler decided to explore this inheritance to see whether he could learn more about his grandfather’s life.

A towering personality packed into a 5'3" frame, Oppenheimer was a wealthy Jewish Berliner who fled the Third Reich in mid-1938, joined basic training in the U.S. Army at forty-five, and ultimately became General Eisenhower’s legal aide and translator—tasked with helping to build a sustainable postwar democracy in his former homeland. This historical biography presents a previously untold David-and-Goliath story, demonstrating how one individual’s persistence can help change the course of history and forge a more hopeful future.

A German Jew’s Triumph portrays Fritz Oppenheimer as a figure of extraordinary skill, moral complexity, and intellectual discipline. Cindy Schweich Handler preserves his voice, his diaries, and the historical record while also inviting readers to grapple with the discomforts of assimilation, restraint, and ethical judgment under extreme circumstances.

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Drawing on a diverse range of sources including archaeology, Buddhist texts, the afterlives of the Hindu temples, maritime networks, and inscriptions from Vietnam and central India, the book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Buddhism, archaeology, heritage studies, cultural studies, and political history as well as South and Southeast Asian history.

Guest: Himanshu Prabha Ray

Interviewer: Natali Pearson

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Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He served as the editor of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC) newsletter from 2016 to 2018 and is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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Through deep archival research, she has carefully reconstructed the sensorial texture of the city, from the posters plastered on walls, to the shop windows' displays, the badges worn by passers-by, and the crowds gathering for protest or celebration. The result is both an atmospheric account of life amid war and regime change, and a fresh interpretation of imperial collapse from below, in which the experience of life on the Habsburg home-front is essential to understanding the post-Versailles world order that followed. Prague is the perfect case study for examining the transition from empire to nation-statehood, hinging on revolutionary dreams of fairer distribution and new forms of political participation.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University.

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Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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Joshua Clark Davis is associate professor of history at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods and the coeditor of Baltimore Revisited, and he has written for The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Atlantic.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here 

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Ballroom: A People's History of Dancing (Reaktion, 2022) by Dr. Hilary French explores the vibrant history of ballroom and Latin dancing: the dances, lavish venues, competitions and influential instructors. It also traces the decline of couple dancing and its resurgence in recent years with the hugely popular TV shows Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing with the Stars.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From its founding in 1893, to its decline in the 1970s, the International Colonial Institute (ICI) was one of the most powerful nongovernmental actors on the colonial scene. Styling itself a reformist institution, the ICI applied the tools of transnational scientific exchange to “rationalize” the practice of colonial rule. As part of this reformist project, members of the ICI mobilized progressive ideas in ways that built broad political consensus across Europe while also furthering inequality, exploitation, and segregation in the Global South, even beyond the end of formal empire. Tracing the long history of the ICI reveals fundamental continuities, argues Florian Wagner, that colonialist narratives of change obscure.

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here.

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The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. “The ground beneath our feet goes unnoticed for the most part. Yet it guides our steps and shapes our identity in many ways. We obey or disregard markings that indicate where to cross the road, stand back from the edge of the platform, or position ourselves on a sports pitch…Differencing convention in homes and places of worship remind us that our own treatment of the surface is culturally constructed."

Dr. Donkin argues that “In the Middle Ages too, the surface of the ground conveyed information to those who stood on it, prompted physical and imaginative responses, and marked out individual and groups in accordance with the values and concerns of the time. Indeed, in some respects, it played a greater role today in articulating space and identity, especially within ecclesiastical settings…. This book focuses on Medieval interaction with holy ground, within and beyond the church interior, asking how these shaped both place and people.”

By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Dr. Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities.

Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people's identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Dr. Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Today’s guest is Ian Smith, Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Ian is the author of the previous monograph, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (Palgrave, 2009), as well as one of the most important articles in early modern literary criticism of the last twenty years, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief.” Ian is the current President of the Shakespeare Association of America.

John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.

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So Browne-Marshall is back, this time with conversation focused specifically on the chapter of the book titled, “Protesting Violent Policing.”

In this episode, we mention Terence Keel’s The Coroner’s Silence (Beacon Press, 2025). Keel’s New Books Network episode is available here.

A Protest History of the United States: In this timely new book in Beacon’s successful ReVisioning History series, professor Gloria Browne-Marshall delves into the history of protest movements and rebellion in the United States. Beginning with Indigenous peoples’ resistance to European colonization and continuing through to today’s climate change demonstrations, Browne-Marshall sheds light on known and forgotten movements and their unsung leaders, offering insights into past successes and setbacks.

Drawing upon legal documents, archival material, memoir, government documents and secondary sources, A Protest History of the United States expands the definition of protest beyond traditional marches and rallies. Acts of resistance also include journalism, legal battles, boycotts, everyday defiance, and more. Browne-Marshall highlights stories of individuals from all walks of life and time periods who helped bring strong attention to their causes.

As contemporary movements struggle with inertia and doubt, Browne-Marshall underscores the essential role of protest as an American tradition in shaping and preserving democratic principles. By illuminating the strategies and sacrifices of activists past and present, A Protest History of the United States empowers readers to find their own voice in today’s fights for justice.

Find author Gloria J. Browne-Marshall at her website and on Instagram.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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Ann Komaromi is a Professor within the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Acting Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her interests include alternative publishing, underground networks and nonconformist literature and art, especially in the Soviet Union after Stalin.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Seeing themselves as “the Fourth and Only Estate,” the sole democratic institution available to a colonized population, early press contributors experimented with the form and function of the newspaper itself. They advanced anticolonial goals through clipping and reprinting articles from a variety of sources; drawing on local ways of speaking; and manipulating photography, comics, and advertising. Such unruly content, James shows, served as a strategic assertion of autonomy against colonial bureaucracy. Yet in the 1950s, this landscape changed as press professionalism became a proxy for a colony’s capacity to govern itself.

Analyzing a key moment in the history of Black Atlantic political thought, The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960 (Harvard UP, 2025) highlights the boundless, shapeshifting power of experimental media. During the era of decolonization, as independence loomed on the horizon, West African and Caribbean newspapers creatively engineered and reinvented debates about imperialism, racial capitalism, and Black freedom dreams and realities.

Leslie James is Reader and Sinor Lecturer in Global History at Queen Mary University of London and the author of George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire, 1939–1959.

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Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions.

The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930's--but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day.

From Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating "Franco-French War" about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures.

Mentioned in the episode

• Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1844)
• George Eliot's (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876)
• Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)?
• The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation--and also in some ways a tragic counterexample.
• The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that.
• Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair.
• America's racial "one drop" rule.
• Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015)
• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.

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Charlie Chaplin rose from the hard streets of Edwardian London to worldwide fame. But his work and outlook were always shaped by the world he came from, a place of cheap entertainments and the threat of the workhouse, radical politics and desperate poverty.

Framed through the life of this iconic success story, acclaimed historian Jacqueline Riding reveals working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Breathing life into forgotten stories of mothers and sons, labourers and actors, vagrants and sex workers, of suffering, survival and success against the odds, this compelling social history paints a striking portrait of a vanished city.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia, as well as the understanding of such faculties as memory and perception. Memory was the site of particularly startling discoveries. As one researcher wrote to another in the middle of that decade, “Memory was the sleeping beauty of the brain—and now she is awake.” Collectively, these advances prefigured the emergence of the field of neuroscience at the end of the twentieth century.

But the 1950s also marked the beginning of the Cold War and a period of transformative social change across Western society. These developments resulted in unease and paranoia. Mysterious new afflictions—none more mystifying than “brainwashing”—also appeared at this time. Faced with the discovery that, as one leading psychiatrist put it, “the human personality is not as stable as we often assume,” many researchers in the sciences of brain and behavior joined the effort to understand these conditions. They devised ingenious and sometimes transgressive experimental methods for studying and proposing countermeasures to the problem of Communist mind control. Some of these procedures took on a strange life of their own, escaping the confines of the research lab to become part of 1960s counterculture. Much later, in the early 2000s, they resurfaced in the War on Terror.

These stories, often told separately, are brought together by the historian Andreas Killen in this chronicle of the brain’s mid-twentieth-century emergence as both a new research frontier and an organ whose integrity and capacities—especially that of memory—were imagined as uniquely imperiled in the 1950s. Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War (Harper, 2023) explores the anxious context in which the mid-century sciences of the brain took shape and reveals the deeply ambivalent history that lies behind our contemporary understanding of this organ.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story by interrogating the lives of laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers. The book is both a personal journey and a history of Black labor in the United States from enslavement to the present day with a focus on a critical era: after Southern Emancipation to the early 20th century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves.

Dr. Kelley captures the character of the lives of Black workers not only as laborers, activists, or members of a class but as individuals whose daily experiences mattered – to themselves, to their communities, and to “the nation at large, even as it denied their importance.” As she weaves together rich oral histories, memoirs, photographs, and secondary sources, she shows how Black workers of all genders were “intertwined with the future of Black freedom, Black citizenship, and the establishment of civil rights for Black Americans.” She demonstrates how her own family’s experiences mirrors this wider history of the Black working class – sometimes in ways that she herself did not realize before writing the book.

Even as the book confronts violence, poor working conditions, and a government that often legislated to protect the interests of white workers and consumers, Black Folk celebrates the ways in which Black people “built and rebuilt vital spaces of resistance, grounded in the secrets that they knew about themselves, about their community, their dignity, and their survival.” Black Folk looks back but also forward. In examining the labor and challenges of individuals, Dr. Kelley sheds light on reparations and suggests that Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be spaces of resistance and labor activism in the 21st century.

Dr. Blair LM Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history. She is also the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson from the University of North Carolina Press.

Dr. Kelley mentions Dr. Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Duke University’s Behind the Veil oral history project, and Philip R. Rubio’s There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality.

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Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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In Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law (Stanford University Press, 2025), Dr. Jessica Lake offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment across 19th-century America, Australia, and England. Drawing upon original archival material, she tracks the creation of the Slander of Women reforms that made it easier for women to sue when called "whores." Dr. Lake reveals, for the first time, the cases brought by women that spurred and benefitted from these reforms. In doing so, she details how debates about women, speech, and reputation circulated through transnational common law networks, connecting countries, colonies, and continents.

The Slander of Women movement furthered legal protections for women, but also created links between ideas of whiteness, femininity, chastity, and civilization. Special Damage tells a compelling story that questions the costs and compromises of legal progress in a patriarchal and unequal "civilised" New World.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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This study of Italy’s Americanism explores social debates within Italy regarding emigration, the development of a Columbian narrative, European reactions to the Spanish-American War, the impact of American products on Italian society, and former US president Woodrow Wilson’s military intervention and political propaganda during the First World War. It highlights discussions among Italians about the implications of emigration, contrasting prevailing negative views with a counter-narrative from Italian journalists, scholars, and missionaries who visited the United States. The negotiation of US imports and their incorporation into the Italian national context document the formation of a distinct American subculture and the early phases of the nation’s Americanization.

The Rise of Americanism in Italy, 1888-1919 (University of Toronto Press, 2025) provides a unique perspective to assess the early stages of America’s “soft” expansion, as the flow of departing and returning emigrants made Italy a favourable terrain for commercial penetration in Europe, transforming an export ideology into a complex network of transatlantic relations.

Luca Cottini, PhD, is an associate professor of Italian in Villanova University. He is also the creator of the popular Youtube channel, Italian Innovators.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 (Harvard UP, 2023) takes as its starting point the consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire, which created new mechanisms for raising troops but also for resolving disputes diplomatically. Both the empire and the Swiss Confederation were largely defensive in orientation, while German participation in foreign wars was most often in partnership with allies. The primary aggressor in Central Europe was not Prussia but the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, yet Austria's strength owed much to its ability to secure allies. Prussia, meanwhile, invested in militarization but maintained a part-time army well into the nineteenth century. Alongside Switzerland, which relied on traditional militia, both states exemplify the longstanding civilian element within German military power.

Only after Prussia's unexpected victory over France in 1871 did Germans and outsiders come to believe in a German gift for warfare--a special capacity for high-speed, high-intensity combat that could overcome numerical disadvantage. It took two world wars to expose the fallacy of German military genius. Yet even today, Wilson argues, Germany's strategic position is misunderstood. The country now seen as a bastion of peace spends heavily on defense in comparison to its peers and is deeply invested in less kinetic contemporary forms of coercive power.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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By the early twentieth century, postbellum assaults on civil rights and the advent of Jim Crow expanded Baltimore’s law enforcement into a vast network designed to oppress Black people. Michael Casiano’s history charts the institutional consolidation of the city’s post–Civil War police state.

Authorities in Baltimore organized and established municipal power in distinct but connected sites that included jails, areas of political and social activism, public schools, street corners, courtrooms, and homes. Casiano analyzes policing in light of two parallel and inextricable realities of the city’s governance. First, policing evolved from an inefficient and vigilante-driven system into a modern and paramilitary endeavor focused on suppressing citizens and maximizing the power, wealth, and reach of capitalists. Second, decades of racial antagonism shaped Baltimore policing into an apparatus primarily oriented around subduing Black freedom.

A compelling urban history, Let Us Alone: The Origins of Baltimore's Police State (U Illinois Press, 2025) uses voices from all levels of society to examine police power, incarceration, and the perils of being Black in post–Civil War Baltimore.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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Introducing a novel framework – martial peace – the book offers an in-depth examination of the Canadian Armed Forces missions to Afghanistan and the use of police violence against Indigenous protests in Canada as case examples where military violence has been justified in the name of peace. It critically investigates the peacekeeper myth and challenges the academic, government and popular beliefs that martial violence is required to sustain peace.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Jovana Babović is an Associate Professor of modern European history at SUNY Geneseo. Her research focuses on urban culture and society in Eastern Europe during the twentieth century.

Profile page: here

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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In the closing months of the First World War, Britain, America, France and Japan sent arms and 180,000 soldiers to Russia, with the aim of tipping the balance in her post-revolutionary Civil War. From Central Asia to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific, they joined anti-Bolshevik forces in trying to overthrow the new men in the Kremlin, in an astonishingly ambitious military adventure known as the Intervention.

Fresh, in the case of the British, from the trenches, they found themselves in a mobile, multi-sided conflict as different as possible from the grim stasis of the Western Front. Criss-crossing the shattered Russian empire in trains, sleds and paddlesteamers, they bivouacked in snowbound cabins and Kirghiz yurts, torpedoed Red battleships from speedboats, improvised new currencies and the world’s first air-dropped chemical weapons, got caught up in mass retreats and a typhus epidemic, organised several coups and at least one assassination. Taking tea with warlords and princesses, they also turned a blind eye to their Russian allies’ numerous atrocities.

Two years later they left again, filing glumly back onto their troopships as port after port fell to the Red Army. Later, American veterans compared the humiliation to Vietnam, and the politicians and generals responsible preferred to trivialise or forget. Drawing on previously unused diaries, letters and memoirs, A Nasty Little War brings an episode with echoes down the century since vividly to life.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam (U Massachusetts Press, 2023), Gerald F. Goodwin examines how Black servicemen experienced and interpreted racial issues during their time in Vietnam. Drawing on more than fifty new oral interviews and significant archival research, as well as newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, and documentaries, Goodwin reveals that for many African Americans the front line and the home front were two sides of the same coin. Serving during the same period as the civil rights movement and the race riots in Chicago, Detroit, and dozens of other American cities, these men increasingly connected the racism that they encountered in the barracks and on the battlefields with the tensions and violence that were simmering back home.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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The new society programme implemented between 1936 and 1950 was applied nation-wide to political activists, members of Republican parties, labour organisations, and (poor) urban and (landless) rural social constituencies. The Francoist project adapted to the changing national and international contexts across the period 1936-1950: from a civil war; through the period of relations with the Axis powers at the same time as receiving Nazi assistance in building up Franco's police force as an agent of repression; to the transformation of Franco into an anti-Communist client of the Cold War West. The Fabric of Fear addresses the social effects of the cleansing process on both victors and vanquished. On the one hand, Franco's violent policy forged a new society and tightened the links between the regime and its social base. On the other hand, the violence and coercion exerted on the vanquished resulted in their civil and legal death: they were expelled from Franco's national community and deprived of all rights in what became de facto an apartheid society in Spain.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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Pacific Island territories, indigenous peoples, regional and secessionist movements, and transnational solidarity groups, among others, rejected the efforts of large, powerful states to define self-determination along narrow lines. Instead, international historian Bradley R. Simpson shows they offered expansive visions of economic, political, and cultural sovereignty ranging far beyond the movement for decolonization with which they are often associated. As they did so, these movements and groups helped to vernacularize self-determination as a language of social justice and rights for people around the world.

An ambitious work of global breadth on a key geopolitical issue, The First Right transforms how we think about the making of the twentieth century world order and the place of the global South and decolonization in it.

Dr. Bradley R. Simpson is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Samee Siddiqui is Assistant Professor of World History at Drury University.

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As addiction became a major public health issue, commentators typically sympathized with white, middle-class drug users, while criticizing such use by poor or working-class people and people of color. When habituation was associated with middle-class morphine users, few advocated for restricted drug access. By the 1910s, as use was increasingly associated with poor young men, support for regulations increased. In outlawing users' access to habit-forming drugs at the national level, a public health problem became a larger legal and social problem, one with an enduring influence on American drug laws and their enforcement.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. She was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego before moving to the UK.

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You can Terrence Keel at his website.

Find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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In The Mobilized American West: 1940-2000 (U Nebraska Press, 2023), University of Washington emeritus professor John Findlay argues that once began, that mobilization never really ended, and continues to define the West to this day. As the latest entry in Nebraska's lauded History of the American West series, Findlay uses the latest scholarship to offer a synthetic look at the recent history of the West, a period that often gets short shrift in Western historiography. Findlay also takes new approaches, looking at the West through the lenses of family history and political culture, to make the case that the region is still distinct and worthy of study as a unique place. Findlay's West is a place of violence, democracy, competing interests, and of beauty, and is a grand confirmation that there are still rich veins to be mined in regional Western histories.

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Laura Robson is Elihu Professor of Global Affairs and History at Yale University.

Joe Maiolo is Professor of International History at King's College London.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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Freedom Enterprise follows Black Southerners' journeys to Detroit during the initial wave of migration in the 1910s and 1920s, through their efforts to build a prosperous Black business community in the 1930s and 1940s, to the destruction of that community through urban renewal projects and freeway construction in the 1950s and 1960s. Combining business and social history methods to analyze an eclectic archive, Boyd chronicles migrant entrepreneurs' experiences, highlighting tales of racial and economic violence, Black women's business organizing, illegal business, communist entrepreneurs, and cooperative economics.

Boyd uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine migrant entrepreneurs' experiences in twentieth-century America. In the Jim Crow South, African Americans worried about white mobs taking away their property, wealth, and lives. Though they sought refuge in Detroit, migrant entrepreneurs subsequently faced the loss of their livelihoods and the businesses they had spent decades building to the bulldozers of state-sponsored urban redevelopment initiatives. Southern migrants' "freedom enterprise"--their undertaking of attaining freedom through business--was curtailed by the reality of operating within the confines of US racial capitalism.

In tracing Black entrepreneurs across the Great Migration, Freedom Enterprise provides important insights into African Americans' activism for racial and economic justice and continued racialized wealth disparities.

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Moritz Föllmer is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. He is particularly interested in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and in concepts of individuality and urbanity in twentieth-century Europe.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935-2025 (UNC Press, 2025)  offers a sweeping history of Mexican American interactions with law enforcement and the criminal justice system in the US Southwest. Looking primarily at Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, Brown and Blue tells a complex story: Violent, often racist acts committed by police against Mexican American people sparked protests demanding reform, and criminal justice authorities sometimes responded positively to these protests with measures such as recruiting Mexican Americans into local police forces and altering training procedures at police academies.
Brian D. Behnken demonstrates the central role that the struggle for police reform played in the twentieth-century Chicano movement, and the ways its relevance continues to the present. By linking social activism and law enforcement, Behnken illuminates how the policing issues of today developed and what reform remains to be done.

Guest: Brian Behnken is a professor of history at Iowa State University. He specializes in African American and Mexican American history, with an emphasis on civil rights activism and comparative race relations. He has published widely within these fields and has also expanded his research focus to explore racial violence, law enforcement, popular culture, and nationalism as they relate to African American and Latino/a/x peoples.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign (UP of Mississippi, 2025) explores this campaign in the context of a broader protest tradition, revealing it to be a full-scale movement that demonstrates the power and complexity of Black women's activism in the mid-twentieth century. O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight argues that the experiences of the women at the center of this conflict offer a window into the plight of Southern Black working-class women and the ways in which they fought for equality, access, and well-being.

Though much of what has been written about the hospital workers' campaign focuses on the strike through an institutional lens, Dixon-McKnight uses extensive interviews and oral history to expand the scope of existing scholarship. Local leaders such as Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, William Saunders, and Isaiah Bennett served as bridge builders for the Black community's involvement in protest, which helped shape and nurture the hospital workers' campaign. By discussing the grassroots organizing that sparked the strike and tracing the aftermath of the conflict, including what workers experienced in their return to work and their relationships with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Local 1199 Hospital and Nursing Home Employees Union, this volume situates the hospital workers' movement as a critical moment in the nation's long civil rights history.

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In God’s Image, Persico examines the central role that the idea that all people were created in the image of God played in the development of Western civilization. Focusing on five themes―selfhood, freedom, conscience, equality, and meaning―the book guides the reader through a cultural history of the West, from ancient times through modernity. It explains how each of these ideals was profoundly influenced by the central biblical conception of humanity’s creation in God’s image, embracing an essential equality among all people, while also emphasizing each human life’s singularity and significance.

The book argues that the West, and particularly Protestant Christianity, grew out of ideas rooted deeply in this notion, and that it played a core role in the development of individualism, liberalism, human rights discourse, and indeed the secularization process. Making the case for a cultural understanding of history, the volume focuses on ideas as agents of change and challenges the common scholarly emphasis on material conditions. Offering an innovative perspective on the shaping of global modernity, In God’s Image examines the relationship between faith and society and posits the fundamental role of the idea of the image of God in the making of the moral ideals and social institutions we hold dear today.

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Sean Mathews is a Greek-American journalist who has covered a wide swath of the Middle East. He is a correspondent with Middle East Eye, and has also written for The Economist and Al-Monitor, among others.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The New Byzantines. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Thomas Albert Howard is professor of humanities and history and holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. He is the author of many books, including The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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These poems open windows onto wildly different worlds – from the public to the intimate, from the witty to the savage, from the playful to the wistful. They take us onto battlefields, inside royal courts, down coal mines and below stairs in great houses. Their creators, witnesses to events from the Great Fire of London to the Miners’ Strike, range from the famous to the forgotten, yet each invites us into an immersive encounter with their own time.

A History of England in 25 Poems (Penguin, 2025) by Professor Catherine Clarke is a portal to the past; a constant companion, filled with vivid voices and surprising stories alongside familiar landmarks, and language that speaks in new ways on each reading. Professor Clarke’s knowledge and passion take us inside the words and the moments they capture, with thoughtful insights, humour and new perspectives on how the nation has dreamed itself into existence – and who gets to tell England’s story.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco (Oxford UP, 2025) delves into the complexities of Franco's character, exploring his volatile relationship with a domineering father, his traumatic experiences fighting in Morocco and the formation of his authoritarian ideology. The narrative follows Franco's ruthless leadership during the Civil War, his alignment with Hitler and Mussolini and the subsequent Cold War era that brought him international rehabilitation. Tremlett interrogates Franco's transformation of Spain through a lens that challenges the conventional view of him as a bumbling leader. Instead, he argues that Franco was a deliberate and pragmatic dictator who wielded terror to maintain an iron grip on power, and whose lasting (and most surprising) contribution was the period of peace that allowed Spain to challenge the absolutist spirit he embodied.
Nuanced and comprehensive, El Generalísimo offers a fresh perspective that reveals the intricate interplay of ambition and fearlessness of Francisco Franco; and examines his enduring legacy that continues to shape Spain's political and cultural landscape.

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Sixteen essays written by leading and emerging scholars bring together new and diverse approaches to the period - a period of reconstruction, fraught with the challenges of modernity and democratisation. The collection considers the complex effects of reconstruction on design, discourse, practice, and professionalism, and deals with the full spectrum of architectural styles and approaches, privileging neither Modernism nor traditional styles. It brings to the fore social and political histories of the built environment, and makes important postcolonial interventions into the architectural history of British Imperialism at home and in its far reaches; in Egypt, South Africa, Australia, and India

This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on cultural techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023).

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New Books in Women’s History Podcast

Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College website

@janescimeca.bsky.social 

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Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals. But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear. From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Helen J. Nicholson's book Women and the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2023) surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570, when the last crusader state, Cyprus, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. It considers women's actions not only on crusade battlefields but also in recruiting crusaders, supporting crusades through patronage, propaganda, and prayer, and as both defenders and aggressors. It argues that medieval women were deeply involved in the crusades but the roles that they could play and how their contemporaries recorded their deeds were dictated by social convention and cultural expectations. Although its main focus is the women of Latin Christendom, it also looks at the impact of the crusades and crusaders on the Jews of western Europe and the Muslims of the Middle East, and compares relations between Latin Christians and Muslims with relations between Muslims and other Christian groups.

Helen J. Nicholson is Professor of Medieval History at Cardiff University, UK. She has published extensively on the crusades, the military orders, and various related subjects, including a translation of a chronicle of the Third Crusade and an edition of the Templar trial proceedings in Britain and Ireland. She has just completed a history of Queen Sybil of Jerusalem (1186-1190).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Considering these events and many others, Staple to Superfood: A Global History of the Sweet Potato (Columbia UP, 2025) explores the sweet potato’s rich history and remarkable global influence. Dr. Q. Edward Wang demonstrates how this resilient root has not only nourished communities but also defined their identities. Tracing its journeys through the intricate networks of global trade and cultural exchange, he shows how the sweet potato transformed agricultural practices, culinary traditions, and social structures worldwide. From the Americas to Europe to Asia and the Pacific, the spread of this crop illuminates the varied paths that global development has taken. Dr. Wang also contrasts the sweet potato with its botanically unrelated namesake, the white potato. Blending agricultural, cultural, and historical perspectives, Staple to Superfood offers a fresh look at the power of food to transform societies. It is a compelling exploration of how the sweet potato shaped the modern world and continues to influence global food systems today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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On May 7, 1945, Kennedy bypassed military censorship to be the first to break the news of the Nazi surrender executed in Reims, France. Both the practice and the public perception of wartime reporting would never be the same. While, at the behest of Soviet leaders, Allied authorities prohibited release of the story, Kennedy stuck to his journalistic principles and refused to manage information he believed the world had a right to know. No action by an American correspondent during the war proved more controversial.

The Paris press corps was furious at what it took to be Kennedy’s unethical betrayal; military authorities threatened court-martial before expelling him from Europe. Kennedy defended himself, insisting the news was being withheld for suspect political reasons unrelated to military security. After prolonged national debate, when the dust settled, Kennedy’s career was in ruins.

This story of Kennedy’s surrender dispatch and the meddling by Allied Command, which was already being called a fiasco in May 1945, revises what we know about media-military relations. Discarding “Good War” nostalgia, Fine challenges the accepted view that relations between the media and the military were amicable during World War II and only later ran off the rails during the Vietnam War. The Price of Truth reveals one of the earliest chapters of tension between reporters committed to informing the public and generals tasked with managing a war.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book manuscript which explains why the United States pursued victory at practically all costs in World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or here. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Susanna Elm is Sidney H. Ehrman Chair and Distinguished Professor of History and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome.

Michael Motia teaches classics and religious studies at UMass Boston

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Find Professor Bland at his website, and on Threads, BlueSky, and X.

Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack where she and Professor Bland continued their conversation.

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Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today.

Matthijs Lok, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Adopting a transnational approach that accounts for the rapid flow of information between Japan and the United States, Bo Tao examines the career of Kagawa as it unfolded within the context of the wars, imperialism, and economic depression of the early to mid-twentieth century. Using official documents and personal correspondence that have received scant attention in previous works, Tao reveals, for the first time at this level of detail, the extent of Kagawa’s cooperative relationship with the Japanese government, as well as the ways in which his idealized image was carefully constructed by his ardent missionary supporters.

This book provides a window into the global dimensions of broader cultural shifts during the interwar period, such as the rise of Christian internationalism and the Depression-era popularity of cooperative economics. Offering a holistic and nuanced exploration of the tensions resulting from Kagawa’s hybrid identity as a Japanese Christian, Cooperative Evangelist adds a new layer to our understanding of religion, empire, and politics in the shaping of social and international relations.

Bo Tao is Lecturer in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Chiba University in Chiba, Japan. His research interests include global history, U.S.-Japan relations, religion and politics, modern Japanese history, and the history of Christianity.

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

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Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.