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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9776
Chuck Wooldridge, “City of Virtues: Nanjing in ...
Nineteenth-century Nanjing was a “city of virtues,” the raw material out of which a series of communities in China built the time and space of their utopian visions. Chuck Wooldridge‘s beautifully written and thoughtfully composed new book City of Virt...
61 min
9777
David Snowdon, “Writing the Prizefight: Pierce ...
When ESPN anchor Stuart Scott passed away from cancer this past January, he was widely hailed for his innovative style, which mixed heavy does of African American slang and pop culture references. His signature phrases are now commonly used terms in th...
49 min
9778
Anna M. Shields, “One Who Knows Me: Friendship ...
Anna M. Shields has written a marvelous book on friendship, literature, and history in medieval China. One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Harvard University Press, 2015) is the first book-length study of friendship in ...
68 min
9779
Jeffrey S. Shoulson, “Fictions of Conversion: J...
In Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Stu...
29 min
9780
George H. Nash, ed., “The Crusade Years, 1933-1...
George H. Nash is an independent scholar, historian, and lecturer. As a scholar of American conservative thought and biographer of Herbert Hoover, Nash edited The Crusade Years, 1933-1955: Herbert Hoover’s Lost Memoir of the New Deal Era and its Afterm...
61 min
9781
Natalia Molina, “How Race is Made in America: I...
“America is a nation of immigrants.” Either this common refrain, or its cousin the “melting pot” metaphor is repeated daily in conversations at various levels of U.S. society. Be it in the private or public realm,
67 min
9782
Tabetha Ewing, “Rumor, Diplomacy, and War in En...
Tabetha Ewing‘s Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) is all about the on dit, the word on the street that everyday Parisians might have picked up,
56 min
9783
Louis A Perez Jr, “The Structure of Cuban Histo...
Cuba is changing fast. Or is it? Our understandings of Cuban history are shaped by decades of polarized interpretations. Cubans themselves have a particularly vital relationship to their past, and have long used it to guide them in times of crisis and ...
55 min
9784
Kelly J. Whitmer, “The Halle Orphanage as Scien...
Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists.
67 min
9785
Gordon H. Chang, “Fateful Ties: A History of Am...
“There was China before there was an America, and it is because of China that America came to be.” According to Gordon H. Chang‘s new book, the idea of “China” became “an ingredient within the developing identity of America itself.
69 min
9786
Shellen Wu, “Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s E...
Shellen Wu‘s new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 (Stanford University Press,
60 min
9787
Nicole Starosielski, “The Undersea Network” (Du...
Nicole Starosielski‘s new book brings an environmental and ecological consciousness to the study of digital media and digital systems, and it is a must-read. The Undersea Network (Duke University Press, 2015) looks carefully and imaginatively at the ge...
67 min
9788
Dan Stone, “The Liberation of the Camps: The En...
Every year I ask my students to tell me when the Holocaust ended. Most of them are surprised to hear me say that it has not yet. Today’s podcast is the fourth of a summer long series of podcasts about the system of camps and ghettos that pervaded Nazi ...
59 min
9789
Douglas B. Bamforth et al., “The Allen Site: A ...
In this episode of New Books in Archaeology we talk with Douglas B. Bamforth about his new book The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). Bamforth focuses primarily on Paleoindian land use repre...
79 min
9790
Christine Desan, “Making Money: Coin, Currency,...
Christine Desan, teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory at Harvard Law School. In this podcast we discuss her new book, Making Money: Coin,
57 min
9791
Kecia Ali, “The Lives of Muhammad” (Harvard UP,...
Muhammad is remembered in a multitude of ways, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. And through each retelling we learn a great deal not only about Muhammad but about the social milieu of the authors. In The Lives of Muhammad (Harvard University Press,
49 min
9792
Tom Jackson, “Chilled: How Refrigeration Change...
Tom Jackson‘s Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again (Bloomsbury, 2015) is a completely engrossing look into the history and technology of refrigeration. This book reads like an expanded chapter of James Burke’s classic boo...
54 min
9793
Laura Isabel Serna, “Making Cinelandia: America...
During the early decades of the 20thcentury the nation of Mexico entered the modern era through a series of social, political, and economic transformations spurred by the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. At the same time,
74 min
9794
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “An Indigenous Peoples’ H...
When Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was thrilled. “I used it as a text immediately,” she remembers. Comrades in the movement anti-war movement, Zinn and Dunbar-Ortiz shared a belief that a ra...
71 min
9795
Leah Wright Rigueur, “The Loneliness of the Bla...
Leah Wright Rigueur is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her book The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton University Press,
67 min
9796
Brian P. Murphy, “Building the Empire State: Po...
Brian P. Murphy is the author of Building the Empire State: Political Economy in the Early Republic (Penn Press, 2015). Murphy is Associate Professor of History at Baruch College, City University of New York. While the Broadway musical, Hamilton,
47 min
9797
Gyanendra Pandey, “A History of Prejudice: Race...
A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is the latest book by Gyanendra Pandey. The book analyses prejudice and democracy through a comparison of African Americans and Indian...
55 min
9798
Joyce E. Salisbury, “Rome’s Christian Empress: ...
Before I read this excellent book, I had no idea that Rome–that is, the Roman Empire–ever had an empress. But, as Joyce E. Salisbury tells us in Rome’s Christian Empress: Galla Placidia Rules at the Twilight of the Empire (Johns Hopkins University Pres...
53 min
9799
Andrew G. Walder, “China Under Mao: A Revolutio...
“With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that 1949 was actually the beginning, not the end, of the Chinese revolution.” Building from this premise, Andrew G. Walder‘s new book looks at the ways that China was transformed in the 1950s in order to und...
74 min
9800
Parks M. Coble, “China’s War Reporters: The Leg...
Parks M. Coble‘s new book is a wonderful study of memory, war, and history that takes the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 and its aftermath as its focus. China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan (Harvard University Press,
61 min