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.
Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
10076
John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen, The Natio...
John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen are the authors of The National Origins of Policy Ideas: Knowledge Regimes in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark (Princeton University Press, 2014). Campbell is the Class of 1925 Professor of Sociology ...
19 min
10077
Bruce Ackerman, “We the People, Volume 3: The C...
Bruce Ackerman is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. His book, We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013) fills out the constitutional history of America’s “Second Reconstruction” period...
63 min
10078
Toby Green, “The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Sla...
Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the Byzantine Empire and Muslim lands,
41 min
10079
Joe Moran, “Armchair Nation: An Intimate Histor...
The social and cultural historian Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK is interested in the everyday moments between great events. In his books Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from ...
47 min
10080
Adam Phillips, “Becoming Freud: The Making of a...
For those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as opposed to short, shrift.
52 min
10081
Ronen Shamir, “Current Flow: The Electrificatio...
Ronen Shamir‘s new book is a timely and thoughtful study of the electrification of Palestine in the early twentieth century. Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2013) makes use of Actor-Network Theory as a methodo...
70 min
10082
John P. Turner, “Inquisition in Early Islam” (I...
Scholars of Islam and historians have frequently pointed to the Miḥna, translated as ‘trial’ or ‘test,’ as a crossroad in the landscape of Islamic history. Professor John P. Turner of Colby College is among those who challenge the long held assumptio...
75 min
10083
Andrew Demshuk, “The Lost German East: Forced M...
At the close of the Second World War, the Allies expelled several million Germans from the eastern portion of the former Reich. Thanks to the work of many historians, we know quite a bit about Allied planning for the expulsion,
70 min
10084
Abigail Perkiss, “Making Good Neighbors: Civil ...
Sitting in my home office this morning, I’ve periodically looked up from my computer screen and out the window to see who the dog is barking at. Sometimes it’s a young mother pushing a stroller, sometimes an older man walking his dogs,
48 min
10085
Michael Bryant, “Eyewitness to Genocide: The Op...
My marginal comment, recorded at the end of the chapter on the Belzec trial in Michael Bryant‘s fine new book Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966 (University of Tennessee Press, 2014), is simple: “!!!!
75 min
10086
Craig Martin, “Subverting Aristotle: Religion, ...
Craig Martin‘s new book carefully traces religious arguments for and against Aristotelianism from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. Based on a close reading of a staggering array of primary sources, Subverting Aristotle: Religion,
67 min
10087
Noah Shusterman, “The French Revolution: Faith,...
This year marks the 225th anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution. You don’t have to be a historian to know and appreciate how significant that revolution is to our understanding of French society and culture since the eighteenth century.
61 min
10088
Edmund Levin, “A Child of Christian Blood: Murd...
There is a lot of nasty mythology about Jews, but surely the most heinous and ridiculous is the bizarre notion that “they” (as if Jews were all the same) have long been in the habit of murdering Christian children, draining them of blood,
65 min
10089
Lisa Gitelman, “Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media...
“One doesn’t so much read a death certificate, it would seem, as perform calisthenics on one…” From the first, prefatory page of Lisa Gitelman‘s new book, the reader is introduced to a way of thinking about documents as tools for creating bodily experi...
64 min
10090
Brian A. Catlos, “Muslims of Medieval Latin Chr...
In the current political climate it might be easy to assume that Muslims in the ‘West’ have always been viewed in a negative light. However, when we examine the historical relationship between Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors we find a much more ...
60 min
10091
Wendy Lower, “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in ...
It seems quite reasonable to wonder if there’s anything more to learn about the Holocaust. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have been researching and writing about the subject for decades. A simple search for “Holocaust” on Amazon turns up a stun...
57 min
10092
Donovan Chau, “Exploiting Africa: The Influence...
Donovan Chau is the author of Exploiting Africa: The Influence of Maoist China in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania (Naval Institute Press, 2014). Chau is an associate professor of political science at California State University.
32 min
10093
Jacqueline E. Whitt, “Bringing God to Men: Amer...
In this original and innovative study of the American military chaplaincy, Jacqueline E. Whitt examines the institution’s challenges and struggles in the post-World War II era, with the Vietnam War acting as the fulcrum for existential change in its id...
67 min
10094
Craig Clunas, “Screen of Kings: Royal Art and P...
Craig Clunas‘s new book explores the significance of members of the imperial clan, or “kings” in Ming China. A king was established in a “state” (guo), and mapping the Ming in terms of guo‘s is a way of mapping Ming space in units that had centers,
75 min
10095
Filip Slaveski, “The Soviet Occupation of Germa...
For over three years, from June 1941 to late 1944, the German Army and related Nazi forces (the SS, occupation troops, administrative organizations) conducted a Vernichtungskrieg–a war of annihilation–against the Soviet Union on Soviet soil.
68 min
10096
John Dickie, “Mafia Republic: Italy’s Criminal ...
Mafia Republic: Italy’s Criminal Curse (Sceptre, 2013) is the second book by John Dickie on the history of the three organized crime groups from Southern Italy: the Sicilian Mafia or Cosa Nostra, the ‘Ndrangheta from Calabria and the Camorra from Naple...
51 min
10097
Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown, “Taming...
Bestiality is more often the subject of jokes than legal cases nowadays, and so it was in late eighteenth-century western New England, when, strangely, two octogenarians were accused in separate towns in the space of a few years. Doron S.
64 min
10098
Benjamin Lieberman, “Remaking Identities: God, ...
What do you say to someone who suggests that genocide is not just destructive, but constructive? This is the basic theme of Benjamin Lieberman‘s excellent new book Remaking Identities: God, Nation and Race in World History (Rowman and Littlefield,
51 min
10099
Luke E. Harlow, “Religion, Race, and the Making...
Luke E. Harlow, Religion, Race and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) examines the role of religion, and more specifically, conservative evangelical Protestant theology,
53 min
10100
Roger Kittleson, “The Country of Football: Socc...
Passion. Flair. Instinct. Improvisation. As the World Cup advances to the knockout stage, you’ll hear these terms associated with the football styles of Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico rather than those of Belgium and Germany.
52 min