New Books in History
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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9476
Daniel Amsterdam, “Roaring Metropolis: Business...
On the podcast this week is Daniel Amsterdam, author of Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (Penn Press, 2016). He is assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology.
16 min
9477
Rory Dickson, “Living Sufism in North America: ...
Rory Dickson’s Living Sufism in North America: Between Tradition and Transformation (SUNY Press, 2015) is the first monograph in English to focus on Sufism in North America. On this note, Dickson takes a risk by marking himself as a trendsetter in this...
58 min
9478
Alisa Solomon, “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural H...
In Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (Metropolitan, 2013), Alisa Solomon, Director of the Arts and Culture concentration in the MA program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism,
44 min
9479
Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Red Rockets’ Glare: Space...
In The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Asif Siddiqi approaches the history of the Soviet space program as a combination of engineering and imagination,
2 min
9480
Christopher Woolgar, “The Culture of Food in En...
Food was central to the lives of people in England during the Middle Ages in ways different than it is today. As Christopher Woolgar reveals in his book The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 (Yale University Press, 2016),
55 min
9481
Richard Bourke, “Empire and Revolution: The Pol...
Richard Bourke, Professor in the History of Political Thought in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, began developing his history of Edmund Burke’s political thought in 1991. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Bur...
46 min
9482
Megan C. Thomas, “Orientalists, Propagandists, ...
In Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Megan Thomas offers a thoroughly researched and closely attentive account of how anthropological sciences cont...
57 min
9483
Jason Pierce, “Making the White Man’s West: Whi...
The West, particularly the mountain West of states like Colorado, Utah, Idaho, has long had an image as a land of white men. This image dates to the 19th century, yet it is counterintuitive. Before it became a white man’s paradise,
51 min
9484
Terri Diane Halperin, “The Alien and Sedition A...
In The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Terri Diane Halperin has provided a political history of the 1790s and explained the origins of one of the most contentious free speech events in A...
56 min
9485
Harini Nagendra, “Nature in the City: Bengaluru...
In Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), Harini Nagendra traces centuries of interaction between ecology and urban change, revealing not only the destructive tendencies of urbanization,
40 min
9486
James E. Campbell, “Polarized: Making Sense of ...
James E. Campbell has written Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (PrincetonUniversity Press, 2016). Campbell is UB Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York.
21 min
9487
Jan Schwarz, “Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Cul...
In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University, Sweden, reveals that in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust,
38 min
9488
Ellen Widmer, “Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan ...
Ellen Widmer’s new book tells a story of the life and work of a literary family in China, in order to open out into a fascinating discussion of the ramifications of that story for how we understand and produce relationships between fiction and history....
61 min
9489
Marc Raboy, “Marconi: The Man Who Networked the...
Our modern networked world owes an oftentimes unacknowledged debt to Guglielmo Marconi. As Marc Raboy demonstrates in Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), it was he who pioneered the concept of wireless global commu...
64 min
9490
Ahmed Ragab, “The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Me...
In his shining new book The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ahmed Ragab, Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Harvard Divinity School,
34 min
9491
E.R. Truitt, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic...
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of current knowledge with our experiences in a world full of marv...
52 min
9492
Stuart Elden “Foucault’s Last Decade” (Polity P...
Why did Michel Foucault radically recast the project of The History of Sexuality? How did he work collaboratively? What was the influence of Antiquity on his thought? In Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity Press, 2016) Stuart Elden,
48 min
9493
Katherine Turk, “Equality on Trial: Gender and ...
Katherine Turk is assistant professor of history at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her book Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (University of Pennsylvania Press,
59 min
9494
Marisa J. Fuentes, “Dispossessed Lives: Enslave...
Marisa J. Fuentes’, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) is an important new book that challenges historians to think more carefully about the methods and categories with which they have ...
44 min
9495
Carsten Schapkow, “Role Model and Countermodel:...
Why were German Jews so fascinated by Iberian Sephardic history? In Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation (Lexington Books, 2015), University of Oklahoma Professor Dr.
50 min
9496
Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Extraterritorial Dreams:...
Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s rich new book, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) takes readers on a global journey in search of late 19th and early 20th century Se...
37 min
9497
Barbara Hahn and Bruce Baker, “The Cotton Kings...
With the recent economic collapse and rising income inequality, lessons drawn from turn-of-the century capitalism have become frequent. Pundits, policymakers, and others have looked to the era to find precursors to an unregulated market,
54 min
9498
James Carl Nelson, “I Will Hold: The Story of U...
Best remembered as the nineteenth commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, Clifton B. Cates began his long and distinguished military career as a second lieutenant in World War I. In I Will Hold: The Story of USMC Legend Clifton B. Cates,
41 min
9499
Holly Allen, “Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: T...
In Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2015), Holly Allen offers a fascinating analysis of how notions of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship were challenged and defined during the...
48 min
9500
David M. Krueger, “Myths of the Rune Stone: Vik...
What do our myths say about us? Why do we choose to believe stories that have been disproven by science? In Myths of the Rune Stone: Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), David M.
62 min