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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10176
Joshua Fogel, “Japanese Historiography and the ...
Joshua A. Fogel‘s new book is a carefully researched and wonderfully thoughtful exploration of the transformations of an artifact as read through the transformations in the way that artifact has been understood historically.
67 min
10177
Keith Waters, “The Studio Recordings of the Mil...
“…when people were hearing us, they were hearing the avant-garde on the one hand, and they were hearing the history of jazz that led up to it on the other hand – because Miles was that history.” -Herbie Hancock,
64 min
10178
Susan Ware, “Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King...
If you’re younger than 45 or so, you probably don’t remember the “Battle of the Sexes.” This tennis match, between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, is one of the iconic moments in American history of the 1970s.
51 min
10179
Rick Baldoz, “The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migra...
Rick Baldoz is the author of The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (NYU Press, 2011), which investigates the complex relationship between the U.S. and Filipinos. Unlike other Asian American groups,
68 min
10180
Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neu...
“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” Most famously in a series of experimental works on electr...
73 min
10181
Samuel Moyn, “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in ...
The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press 2010) takes the reader on a sweeping journey through the history of international law from the ancient world to the present in search for an answer to the question: where did human righ...
61 min
10182
Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, “Theaters of Vio...
We spend a lot of time arguing about the meaning and implications of words in the field of genocide studies. Buckets of ink have been spilled defining and debating words like genocide, intent, ‘in part,’ and crimes against humanity.
60 min
10183
Neil McKenna, “Fanny and Stella: The Young Men ...
There is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be. It’s a statement that seems obvious enough and yet one which is still, to some degree, casually combative. For biography has long been a genre wherein story-telling is disproportionately de...
50 min
10184
Angela N. H. Creager, “Life Atomic: A History o...
Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (University of Chicago Press,
69 min
10185
David Spafford, “A Sense of Place: The Politica...
So many history books take for granted that a story about the past needs to focus on change (gradual or dramatic, transformative or subtle) as its motivating narrative and argumentative core. In A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieva...
73 min
10186
Sandrine Sanos, “The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Ri...
Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013), examines the central roles that gender, sexuality, and race played in the far-right ideologies of the...
58 min
10187
Yuval Levin, “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, T...
If you went to college in the United States and took a Western Civ class, you’ve probably read at least a bit of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791).
59 min
10188
Jeffrey Church, “Infinite Autonomy: The Divided...
Jeffrey Church is the author of Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche (Penn State Press 2012). The book won the Best First Book Award from the Political Theory Section of the American...
26 min
10189
Conevery Bolton Valencius, “The Lost History of...
The story begins with Davy Crockett and his hunting dogs chasing a bear in 1826. The bear gets caught in an earthquake crack, an effect of the great Mississippi Valley earthquakes of 1811-1812 that are now collectively known as the New Madrid earthquak...
63 min
10190
Darrin M. McMahon, “Divine Fury: A History of G...
Here’s an odd thing: there really haven’t been any universally-acclaimed geniuses since Einstein. At least I can’t think of any. Really smart people, yes. But geniuses per se, no. It seems Einstein was such a genius that he destroyed the entire concept...
69 min
10191
Jennifer Sessions, “By Sword and Plow: France a...
Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whose business was war. They were conquerors, and conquering was what they did. So,
59 min
10192
Nathaniel Millett, “The Maroons of Prospect Blu...
This is a very timely book, coming as it does in the midst of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 — the war that gave birth to the maroon community of Prospect Bluff, Florida. In his book The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom i...
49 min
10193
Denis Kozlov, “Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with ...
In Russia’s collective memory, the Stalin terror is often remembered and referred to by its most grueling year: “1937.” Following Stalin’s death and the shocking revelations about his regime exposed by his successor Nikita Khrushchev,
40 min
10194
Julie Berebitsky, “Sex and the Office: A Histor...
How to research the history of sexual harassment in the office, when the term sexual harassment was only invented in 1975 and it was long tabou to even use the word sex in conversation? Using an array of rich sources — from Treasury Department archives...
63 min
10195
Sunil S. Amrith, “Crossing the Bay of Bengal: T...
When historians think oceanically, when they populate their books with characters that include seas and monsoons along with human beings, what results is a very different way of thinking about time, space, and the ways that their interactions shape hum...
65 min
10196
Brian Jay Jones, “Jim Henson: The Biography” (B...
In the field of children’s programming, few people- with the possible exception of Fred Rogers- are as beloved as Jim Henson, a contributor to Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live, but most famous for his creation of the Muppets. And yet,
57 min
10197
Daniel Sherman, "French Primitivism and the End...
An interview with Daniel Sherman
58 min
10198
Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul, “The World in...
The Atlantic magazine recently asked its readers to name the greatest athlete of all time. The usual suspects were present among the nominees: Jesse Owens, Pele, Wayne Gretzky, Don Bradman. Given that these were readers of The Atlantic,
49 min
10199
Susan D. Carle, “Defining the Struggle: Nationa...
Historians tell stories, and stories have beginnings and ends. Most human eras, however, are not so neat. Their beginnings and ends tend to blend into one another. This is why historians are often arguing about when eras–the Roman Empire,
53 min
10200
Agostino Cilardo, “The Early History of Islamil...
Al-QÄá¸Ä« al-Nu῾mÄn (d. 363/974) was the primary architect of IsmÄ῾īlÄ« jurisprudence which was formed under the Fatamids. The Early History of Ismaili Jurisprudence (I. B. Tauris, 2013) provides an English translation and edited Arabic editio...
41 min