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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10151
Ellen D. Wu, “The Color of Success: Asian Ameri...
Ellen D. Wu‘s The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2014) charts the complex emergence of the model minority myth in fashioning Asian American stereotypes throughout the twentieth centu...
55 min
10152
Matthew Cecil, “Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Est...
Matthew Cecil brought many questions into his latest historical work, Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image (University Press of Kansas, 2014). Questions included,
50 min
10153
Sarah Pessin, “Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire...
Neoplatonists, including the 11th century Jewish philosopher-poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol, are often saddled with a cosmology considered either as outdated science or a kind of “invisible floating Kansas” in which spatiotemporal talk isn’t really about spa...
74 min
10154
Deborah Cohen, “Family Secrets: Shame and Priva...
51 min
10155
Nitzan Lebovic, “The Philosophy of Life and Dea...
Thomas Mann referred to Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) as a “criminal philosopher,” a “Pan-Germanist,” “an irrationalist,” a “Tarzan philosopher,” “a cultural pessimist… the voice of the world’s downfall.” Yet, Walter Benjamin urged his friend Gershom Schol...
70 min
10156
Robert Neer, “Napalm: An American Biography” (H...
Just as there is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be, so there is no rule dictating that biography must be about the life of a person. In recent years, the jettisoning of this tradition has led to a number of compelling explorations of...
45 min
10157
Aram Goudsouzian, “Down to the Crossroads: Civi...
When I was a kid in the 1970s, I really didn’t know anything about the “Civil Rights Movement.” I knew who Martin Luther King was, and that he had been assassinated by white racists (I knew quite a few of those). But to me all that was old history. The...
51 min
10158
Sara Bannerman, “The Struggle for Canadian Copy...
In The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971, Sara Bannerman narrates the complex story of Canada’s copyright policy since the mid-19th century. The book details the country’s halting attempts to craft a copyright ...
55 min
10159
John L. Modern, “Secularism in Antebellum Ameri...
The notion of secularism is something that has a ubiquitous presence in contemporary society. And while there is a general everyday use of this term, meaning ‘not religious,’ the understanding of this term has shifted throughout time.
67 min
10160
Jarrod Gilbert, “Patched: The History of Gangs ...
Jarrod Gilbert is very lucky that he comes from a country the size of New Zealand. With only 4 million people he could carry out a project that would be beyond the abilities of someone from a large nation and beyond the scope of a single book, namely,
41 min
10161
Michael O’Brien, ed., “The Letters of C. Vann W...
Few historians have influenced their field the way that C. Vann Woodward (1908-99) changed the writing of southern history. First at Johns Hopkins and then at Yale, Woodward’s books, reviews, and mentoring turned southern history into one of the most d...
56 min
10162
Olga Gershenson, “The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet...
Fifty years of Holocaust screenplays and films -largely unknown, killed by censors, and buried in dusty archives – come to life in Olga Gershenson‘s The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (Rutgers University Press, 2013).
71 min
10163
H. Glenn Penny, “Kindred by Choice: Germans and...
If you have spent a bit of time in Germany or with German friends, you may have noticed the deep interest and affinity many Germans have for American Indians. What are the origins of this striking and enduring fascination? In many ways,
48 min
10164
Patricia Ebrey, “Emperor Huizong” (Harvard Univ...
Patricia Ebrey‘s beautifully written and exhaustively researched new book introduces readers to an emperor of China as artist, collector, father, ruler, scholar, patron, and human being. Emperor Huizong (Harvard University Press,
65 min
10165
Rebecca Williams, “Muhammad and the Supernatura...
Rebecca Williams‘ book Muhammad and the Supernatural: Medieval Arab Views (Routledge, 2013) is one of the newest additions to the Routledge Studies in Classic Islam series. Despite the Qur’anic proclamation that the only “miracle” which served as proof...
71 min
10166
Lauren Coodley, “Upton Sinclair: California Soc...
Everybody knows the author of The Jungle was Upton Sinclair (or, if they’re a little confused, they might say Sinclair Lewis). As Lauren Coodley shows in her new biography Upton Sinclair: California Socialist,
55 min
10167
Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-D...
Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the biological sciences.
74 min
10168
Clare Mulley, “The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets a...
It’s almost a cliché by now to say that we need stories of strong women, but that doesn’t lessen the fact that we do. And biography is a field uniquely poised to transmit such stories- of compelling, complex and, at times,
39 min
10169
Joseph Albini and Jeffrey S. McIllwain, “Decons...
Joseph Albini and Jeffrey S. McIllwain, Deconstructing Organized Crime: An Historical and Theoretical Study (MacFarlane, 2012) is not, as some academics might think, a post-modern analysis of organized crime. It is however,
50 min
10170
David N. Livingstone, “Adam’s Ancestors: Race, ...
A report to the General Assembly of Scottish Presbyterians of 1923 contains the following passage: “God placed the people of this world in families, and history which is the narrative of His providence tells us that when kingdoms are divided against th...
70 min
10171
John Matthew Smith, “The Sons of Westwood: John...
48 min
10172
Patrick Weil, “The Sovereign Citizen: Denatural...
Patrick Weil is the author of The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He is a visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a senior research fellow at the French Nat...
52 min
10173
Amy L. Wood, “Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessin...
Host Jonathan Judaken talks with author and professor Amy Wood about her book, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Wood discusses her book,
31 min
10174
Xolela Mangcu, “Biko: A Life” (Tauris, 2013)
Host Jonathan Judaken speaks with Xolela Mangcu, biographer of Anti-Apartheid leader Steve Biko, about the life and murder of Steve Biko, as well as the struggle for equality in South Africa under Apartheid rule,
32 min
10175
Kathleen Wellman, “Queens and Mistresses of Ren...
Queens and royal mistresses of the Renaissance were the Hollywood celebrities of their time, which explains their enduring magnetism for writers, artists, and the public. Historians and scholars, however, have long ignored them.
65 min