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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10101
Wensheng Wang, “White Lotus Rebels and South Ch...
Wensheng Wang‘s new book takes us into a key turning point in the history of the Qing empire, the Qianlong-Jiaqing reign periods. In White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Harvard University Press, 2014),
71 min
10102
J. Matthias Determann, “Historiography in Saudi...
Saudi Arabia is, for most Westerners, a mysterious place. It’s home to one of the most conservative forms of Islam around and ruled by one of the least democratic regimes in the world. Yet it’s a great friend of the liberal, democratic Western powers,
56 min
10103
John Nathan Anderson, “Radio’s Digital Dilemma:...
John Nathan Anderson’s new book, Radio’s Digital Dilemma: Broadcasting in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2014), documents the somewhat tortured path of broadcast radio’s digital transition in the United States.
50 min
10104
Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narc...
“It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists.” From this opening, Elizabeth Lunbeck‘s new book proceeds to offer a fascinating narrative of how this came to be,
69 min
10105
Olivier Zunz, “Philanthropy in America: A Histo...
Olivier Zunz is the author of Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton University Press 2014). The paperback addition of the book has recently been published with a new preface from the author. Zunz is Commonwealth Professor of History at the Univ...
31 min
10106
Omar Valerio-Jimenez, “River of Hope: Forging I...
Historically speaking, who you were depended on who your rulers were and the ethnic identity (including language, religion, and folkways) of “your” people. In the era of nation-states–that is, our era–these two characteristics have, for most people,
60 min
10107
James Carter, “Heart of Buddha, Heart of China:...
Jay Carter‘s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk (Oxford University Press,
70 min
10108
David Reimer, “Count Like an Egyptian: A Hands-...
[Re-posted with permission from Sol Lederman’s Wild About Math] I love novel ways of looking at arithmetic. I’m fascinated with how computers compute in binary, with tricks for simplifying calculations and with how Vedic mathematicians handle difficult...
76 min
10109
David Williams, “I Freed Myself: African Americ...
Lincoln was very clear–at least in public–that the Civil War was not fought over slavery: it was, he said, for the preservation of the Union first and foremost. So it’s not surprising that when the conflict started he had no firm plan to emancipate the...
57 min
10110
John L. Brooke, “Climate Change and the Course ...
Climate change is in the news a lot today. There seems to be little doubt that it’s getting warmer and that, should present trends continue, the warming trend will have “historical” consequences. Things are going to change. Ever thus. As John L.
66 min
10111
Stephen R. Platt, “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingd...
Stephen R. Platt‘s new book is a beautifully written and intricately textured account of the bloodiest civil war of all time. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Vintage Books,
73 min
10112
Jace Weaver, “The Red Atlantic: American Indige...
For all the incisive work published in Native American and Indigenous studies over the past decades, troubling historical myths still circulate in both academic and popular discourse. One of the most persistent is how we tell the story of the Atlantic ...
48 min
10113
Omar W. Nasim, “Observing by Hand: Sketching th...
In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press,
67 min
10114
Clare Haru Crowston, “Credit, Fashion, Sex: Eco...
Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the economy is at the moment.
58 min
10115
Geoffrey Wawro, “A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbrea...
When I was in graduate school, those of us who studied World War One commented regularly on the degree to which historians concentrated their attention on the Western front at the expense of the other aspects of the war.
59 min
10116
Najam Haider, “The Origins of the Shia: Identit...
When did groups in Kufa begin forming unique identities leading to the development of Shiism? Najam Haider, professor of Religion at Barnard College of Columbia University, answers this question in his book, The Origins of Shia: Identity, Ritual,
41 min
10117
Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860...
The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating w...
58 min
10118
Anne Gorsuch, “All This is Your World: Soviet T...
Thirty years after a trip to the GDR, Soviet cardiologist V.I. Metelitsa still remembered mistakenly trying to buy a dress for a ten-year-old daughter in a maternity shop: ‘In our country I couldn’t even imagine that such a specialized shop could exist...
42 min
10119
Tina Santi Flaherty, “What Jackie Taught Us” (P...
Originally, particularly in American writings, one of the explicit purpose of biography was to teach readers how to live. As Scott E. Caspar writes in Constructing American Lives (1999), in nineteenth-century America “biography remained the essential g...
25 min
10120
Christine Knauer, “Let Us Fight as Free Men: Bl...
Recent controversies over integrating the military have focused on issues of gender and sexuality. In the 1940s and 50s, however, the issue was racial integration. As Christine Knauer shows in her new book Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and C...
61 min
10121
Lawrence Goldstone, “Birdmen: The Wright Brothe...
In Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies (Ballentine Books, 2014), Lawrence Goldstone recounts the discovery and mastery of aviation at the turn of the twentieth century–and all the litigation that ensued.
47 min
10122
Paula A. Michaels, “Lamaze: An International Hi...
The twentieth-century West witnessed a revolution in childbirth. Before that time, most women gave birth at home and were attended by family members and midwives. The process was usually terribly painful for the mother.
68 min
10123
Richard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and ...
During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the buildings and streets of his city were licked and then ...
69 min
10124
Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, “Nazis, ...
This book tells a remarkable and–to me at least–little known but very important story. In Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East(Yale UP, 2014), Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz trace the many connections between Germany–Imperi...
59 min
10125
Richard Weikart, “Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Purs...
For many years now, historians have wondered whether Hitler had any sort of consistent ideology. His writings are rambling and confusing. His speeches are full of plain lies. His “table talk” reflects a wandering,
53 min