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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10276
Nathaniel Comfort, “The Science of Human Perfec...
“This is a history of promises.”So begins Nathaniel Comfort‘s gripping and beautifully written new book on the relationships between and entanglements of medical genetic and eugenics in the history of the twentieth century.
68 min
10277
Dale Maharidge, “Bringing Mulligan Home: The Ot...
Dale Maharidge‘s Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War (PublicAffairs, 2013) is something of a departure from our regular offerings. Normally our authors are established academics specializing in the field of military history.
71 min
10278
Christopher Hookway, “The Pragmatic Maxim: Essa...
Charles Sanders Peirce was the founder of the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism. He is also the proponent of a distinctive variety of pragmatism that has at its core a logical rule that has come to be known as “the pragmatic maxim.
64 min
10279
Mark Byington, ed., “Early Korea: The Rediscove...
Early Korea is a resource like no other: in an ongoing series of volumes produced by the Early Korea Project at the Korea Institute of Harvard University, the series provides surveys of Korean scholarship on fundamental issues in the study of early Kor...
73 min
10280
Daniel Kilbride, “Being American in Europe: 175...
When Americans go overseas, they know just who they are–Americans. But what was it like for a citizen of the United States to go abroad before there was a clear idea of what an “American” was? This is one (among many) of the fascinating questions Danie...
63 min
10281
Luuk van Middelaar, “The Passage to Europe: How...
At the end of the 20th century, it looked like history was being made. After a century that had seen Europe dissolve into an orgy of bloody conflict not once but twice, the continent seemed to have changed its ways.
44 min
10282
Drew Maciag, “Edmund Burke in America: The Cont...
Drew Maciag, author of Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2013) spoke with Ray Haberski about the intellectual challenges Burke raised in a time of democratic revolutions and th...
58 min
10283
Nancy Segal, “Born Together-Reared Apart: The L...
Identical twins, separated at birth, raised in different families, and reunited in adulthood. In 1979, psychology researchers in Minnesota found some twins who had been reunited after a lifetime of separation,
50 min
10284
Gretchen Soderlund, “Sex Trafficking, Scandal, ...
Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 2013), the new book from the University of Oregon’s Gretchen Soderlund, is about far more than the title suggests.
46 min
10285
Amanda MacKenzie Stuart, “Empress of Fashion: D...
The title says it all: Diana Vreeland was, in fact, that Empress of Fashion, reigning over Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute for half a century. As a result, her life story stretches the conventions of biogr...
43 min
10286
Elizabeth Foster, “Faith in Empire: Religion, P...
How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal,
79 min
10287
Colin Gordon, “Growing Apart: A Political Histo...
Americans seem to be more concerned about economic inequality today than they have been in living memory. The Occupy Movement (“We are the 99%”) is only the most visible sign of this growing unease. But what are the dimensions of inequality in the Unit...
69 min
10288
Maki Fukuoka, “The Premise of Fidelity: Science...
Zograscope. Say it with me: zograscope. ZooooOOOOOoooograscope. There are many optical wonders in Maki Fukuoka’s new book The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan (Stanford University Press, 2012),
68 min
10289
Lawrence R. Samuel, “Shrink: A Cultural History...
Before the Second World War, very few Americans visited psychologists or psychiatrists. Today, millions and millions of Americans do. How did seeing a “shrink” become, quite suddenly, a typical part of the “American Experience?
2 min
10290
Christopher Browning, “Remembering Survival: In...
Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies. He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the field: the intentionalist/functionalist discussion about when,
62 min
10291
Samir Chopra, “Brave New Pitch: The Evolution o...
The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains. For the fifth year in a row, no Pakistani players were selected for the league’s teams,
45 min
10292
Logan Beirne, “Blood of Tyrants: George Washing...
You sometimes see bumper stickers that say “What would Jesus do?” It’s a good question, at least for Christians. You don’t see bumper stickers that say “What would Washington do?” But that, Logan Beirne says, is a question Americans should be asking.
64 min
10293
Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh, “The Lius of ...
I like to think of Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh‘s new book as Downton Abbey: Shanghai Edition. It is that gripping, and will keep you turning the pages that eagerly. At the same time, The Lius of Shanghai (Harvard University Press,
72 min
10294
Michael Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life” (...
What can be gained from another biography of Abraham Lincoln? A lot, it turns out. Michael Burlingame has been researching the life and times of Abraham Lincoln during his entire career as a historian. As he explains in this interview,
76 min
10295
Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Why Europe Grew Rich ...
It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are f...
56 min
10296
David J. Silbey, “The Boxer Rebellion and the G...
Historian David Silbey returns to New Books in Military History with his second book, The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China (Hill and Wang, 2012). The popular uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion has long only been vaguely understood,
74 min
10297
Kathryn Livingston, “Lilly: Palm Beach, Tropica...
It’s rare that a person’s name comes to represent an object, but such is the case with Lilly Pulitzer. Just say ‘Lilly’ and it conjures images of simple sheath dresses in vivid colors. But what of Lilly Pulitzer herself?
52 min
10298
Martin A. Miller, “The Foundations of Modern Te...
Terrorism seems like the kind of thing that has existed since the beginning of states some 5,000 years ago. Understood in one, narrow way–as what we call “insurgency”–it probably has. But modern terrorism is, well, modern as Martin A.
65 min
10299
Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, “Forging Freedom: Bla...
How were black women manumitted in the Old South, and how did they live their lives in freedom before the Civil War? Historian, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University in Bloomington) answers thi...
53 min
10300
Fabio Lanza, “Behind the Gate: Inventing Studen...
The history of modern China is bound up with that of student politics. In Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010), Fabio Lanza offers a masterfully researched, elegantly written,
72 min