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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10226
Steven Usitalo, “The Invention of Mikhail Lomon...
Mikhail Lomonosov is a well known Russian figure. As poet, geographer, and physicist, Lomonosov enjoyed access to the best resources that 18th century Russia had to offer. As a result, his contributions to Russian arts and sciences were immeasurable.
58 min
10227
Simon P. Newman, “A New World of Labor: The Dev...
Ask most educated people about the development of American slavery, and you’re likely to hear something about Virginia or, just maybe, South Carolina. In his far-reaching but concise and elegantly written new book A New World of Labor: The Development ...
57 min
10228
Robert Gellately, “Stalin’s Curse: Battling for...
It takes two to tango, right? Indeed it does. But it’s also true that someone has got to ask someone else to dance before any tangoing is done. Beginning in the 1960s, the American intellectual elite argued–and seemed to really believe–that the United ...
74 min
10229
Allen Salkin “From Scratch: Inside the Food Net...
When I was growing up the only cooking show on TV I remember was Julia Child. I sometimes watched “The French Chef,” not so much to learn anything about cooking, but rather just to watch Julia. She was a hoot.
64 min
10230
Dan Stone, “Histories of the Holocaust” (Oxford...
I don’t think it’s possible anymore for someone, even an academic with a specialty in the field, let alone an interested amateur, to read even a fraction of the literature written about the Holocaust. If you do a search for the word “Holocaust” on Amaz...
59 min
10231
Sanja Perovic, "The Calendar in Revolutionary F...
An interview with Sanja Perovic
60 min
10232
Robert Cassanello, “To Render Invisible: Jim Cr...
The story of the rise of Jim Crow in Jacksonville, Florida is in many ways illustrative of the challenges facing newly emancipated African Americans throughout the South with local officials erecting barriers to black participation; blacks building ins...
68 min
10233
Adam R. Shapiro, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Tr...
During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned reading from George W.
71 min
10234
John P. DiMoia, “Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedi...
For a patient choosing among available forms of healing in the medical marketplace of mid-20th century South Korea, the process was akin to shopping. In Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945 (Stanford...
83 min
10235
W. Caleb McDaniel, “The Problem of Democracy in...
How could members of a movement committed to cosmopolitanism accommodate nationalism? How could men and women committed to non-resistance reconcile themselves to politics when the authority of even democratic polities depended ultimately upon the threa...
62 min
10236
Sarah Churchwell, “Careless People: Murder, May...
One phenomenon of movies made of classic novels is that the movie often says a lot more about the time of its making than about the time of the novel. And so Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is more a depiction of a 2012 idea of the 1920s than a...
44 min
10237
Tevi Troy, “What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, a...
Presidents, you know, are people too. They read the newspaper (including the sports page and the funnies), settle in with books (yes, beach reading too), watch movies and TV (after all, they have a private theatre in the White House),
63 min
10238
Robert Horwitz, “America’s Right: Anti-Establis...
Robert Horwitz is the author of America’s Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party (Polity, 2013). Horwitz is professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego.
24 min
10239
Louise Young, “Beyond the Metropolis: Second Ci...
During the interwar period (1918-1937), the city began to take its modern shape in Japan. At the same time, development in the Japanese provinces became a capitalist frontier in a new phase of industrial revolution.
67 min
10240
John K. Thornton, “A Cultural History of the At...
Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of historical research over the past quarter century.
64 min
10241
Kate Brown, “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic...
Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk,
54 min
10242
Michael Lind, “Land of Promise: An Economic His...
Over the last several podcasts, authors (Stedman Jones, Buchman, and Tienken) have repeatedly evoked neoliberalism. A new book helps to place this term and its meaning in American political history into better context. Michael Lind,
24 min
10243
Kees Boterbloem, “Moderniser of Russia: Andrei ...
As you can read in any Russian history textbook, a series of seventeenth-century tsars culminating in Peter the Great attempted to “modernize” Russia. This is not false: the Romanovs did initiate a great wave of “Europeanizing” reforms.
62 min
10244
Nancy Khalek, “Damascus after the Muslim Conque...
A top five finalist for the Best First Book in the History of Religion Award, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest (Oxford University Press, 2011) by Nancy Khalek, professor of Religious Studies at Brown University, is a study of the city of Damascus,
38 min
10245
Fabian Drixler, “Mabiki: Infanticide and Popula...
The book opens on a scene in the mountains of Gumna, Japan. A midwife kneels next to a mother who has just given birth, and she proceeds to strangle the newborn. It’s an arresting way to begin an inspiring new book by Fabian Drixler.
71 min
10246
Reza Aslan, “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesu...
Christians in the United States and around the world have varying images of Jesus, from one who turns the other cheek to one who brings the sword. Reza Aslan, in his highly popular and beautifully written new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of...
41 min
10247
Wendy Z. Goldman, “Inventing the Enemy: Denunci...
A period of mass repression and terror swept through the Soviet Union between the years of 1936-39. Following the shocking Kirov assassination and show trials of alleged factory saboteurs, paranoia gripped the nation and culminated in the execution and...
52 min
10248
Michael J. Kramer, “The Republic of Rock: Music...
Michael J. Kramer, author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), spoke with Ray Haberski about the way rock music became a venue, a medium,
74 min
10249
Ronald Suny et al., “A Question of Genocide: Ar...
Hitler famously said about the Armenian genocide “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” For much of the last 75 years, few people did in fact speak of it. When they did, the discussion largely revolved around the question...
51 min
10250
Michael Innis-Jimenez, “Steel Bario: The Great ...
Michael Innis-Jimenez is the author of Steel Bario: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915-1940 (New York University Press, 2013). Innis-Jimenez is assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama.
19 min