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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10001
Lyman Johnson, “Workshop of Revolution: Plebian...
Lyman Johnson‘s book Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776-1810 (Duke University Press, 2011) analyzes the economic, political, and social lives of working people in Argentina’s colonial capital.
57 min
10002
Susan Schulten, “Mapping the Nation: History an...
Our everyday lives are saturated with maps. We use maps on our smart phones to help us navigate from place to place. Maps in the newspaper and online show us the spread of disease, the state of the planet, and the conflicts among nations.
48 min
10003
Timothy Michael Law, “When God Spoke Greek: The...
When a contemporary reader opens up their Bible they may be unaware of the long historical process that created the pages within. One of the key components in this history is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures between the third ...
56 min
10004
Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, ...
Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepre...
68 min
10005
Michelle Moyd, “Violent Intermediaries: African...
In her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd writes about theaskari,
64 min
10006
Todd H. Weir, “Secularism and Religion in Ninet...
If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ness” would seem to be the modern essence of the word.
63 min
10007
Henry Nau, “Conservative Internationalism: Arme...
The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have raised important questions about the future direction of U.S. foreign policy and how Americans can best exercise power abroad in the coming years. Commentators have not shied away from offering advice.
88 min
10008
Victor Pickard, “America’s Battle for Media Dem...
The media system in the United States could have developed into something very different than what it is today. In fact, there was an era in which significant media reform was considered. This was a time when media consumers were tired of constant adve...
28 min
10009
Brian Purnell, “Fighting Jim Crow in the County...
Scholars interested in the history of the civil rights movement in the North will definitely be interested in Brian Purnell‘s new book, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings:The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (University Press of Kentucky,
61 min
10010
Wai-yee Li, “Women and National Trauma in Late ...
Wai-yee Li‘s new book explores writing around the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, paying careful attention to the relationships of history and literature in writing by women, about women, and/or in a feminine voice.
64 min
10011
Kathleen Lopez, “Chinese Cubans: A Transnationa...
Successive waves of migration brought thousands of Chinese laborers to Cuba over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The coolie trade, which was meant to replace waning supplies of slaves, was but the first. In the twentieth century,
66 min
10012
Edward Ross Dickinson, “Sex, Freedom and Power ...
In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultu...
73 min
10013
Michael Gibbs Hill, trans., Wang Hui, “China fr...
Michael Gibbs Hill‘s new translation renders into English, for the first time, the introduction and overview to Wang Hui‘s 4-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi, 2004). China from Empire to Nation-State (Harvard Uni...
61 min
10014
Vahid Brown and Don Rassler, “Fountainhead of J...
Vahid Brown and Don Rassler‘s Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012 (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a meticulously researched and remarkably detailed exposition of the Haqqani network’s growth and ongoing importance among Pakistani mil...
64 min
10015
Caterina Pizzigoni, “The Life Within: Local Ind...
Caterina Pizzigoni’s book The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650-1800 (Stanford University Press, 2012) provides a close examination of indigenous society in central Mexico.
51 min
10016
Steven Conn, “Americans Against the City: Anti-...
Americans have a paradoxical relationship with cities, Steven Conn argues in his new book,Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2014). Nearly three-quarters of the population lives near an urban ce...
55 min
10017
Clark Chilson, “Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Bu...
Clark Chilson‘s new book, Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014) examines secret groups of Shin (i.e., True Pure Land Buddhist) practitioners from the thirteenth century onw...
65 min
10018
Edward E. Andrews, “Native Apostles: Black and ...
Often when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E.
70 min
10019
Kirsten Weld, “Paper Cadavers: The Archives of ...
Kirsten Weld‘s book Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2014) tells the story of the 2005 discovery of a vast police archive in Guatemala. Officials had long denied that it existed, and for good reason,
63 min
10020
Lawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining ...
Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century developments that have come to be known as the Scientific Rev...
67 min
10021
Eric Allen Hall, “Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justi...
When he died from AIDS in 1993, Arthur Ashe was universally hailed as a man of principle, grace, and wisdom–a world-class athlete who had transcended his game. But a closer look at Ashe’s life reveals a more complex picture. Certainly,
46 min
10022
John Morrow and Jeffrey Sammons, “Harlem’s Ratt...
John Morrow and Jeffrey Sammons share their insights on the story of the fabled 369th Infantry Regiment in their book, Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality (University Press of Ka...
76 min
10023
Mary C. Neuberger, “Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and t...
By the late 1960s, Bulgaria was the world’s number one exporter of tobacco, perhaps the pinnacle of the place of tobacco in the economic, social and political development of modern Bulgaria. In Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (...
42 min
10024
Angela Stent, “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-...
In 2005, the Comedy Central Network aired an episode of “South Park” in which one of the characters asked if any “Third World” countries other than Russia had the ability to fly a whale to the moon. During a press conference that took place two years l...
75 min
10025
Terry Golway, “Machine Made: Tammany Hall and t...
For most Americans, Tammany Hall is a symbol of all that was dishonest, corrupt, illiberal, and venal about urban government and the political machines that ran it in the past, a shorthand for larceny on a grand scale. Not so, says Terry Golway.
52 min