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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10351
Donald Bloxham, “The Final Solution: A Genocide...
The end of the Cold War dramatically changed research into the Holocaust. The gradual opening up of archives across Eastern Europe allowed a flood of local and regional studies that transformed our understanding of the Final Solution.
70 min
10352
Joy Porter, “Native American Freemasonry: Assoc...
Joy Porter is the author of Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America (University of Nebraska Press, 2011). She has also written several other publications, including, To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Cas...
22 min
10353
Deborah R. Coen, “The Earthquake Observers: Dis...
Deborah R. Coen‘s new book chronicles how the earthquake emerged and receded as a scientific object through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Half of the chapters in The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (University of...
47 min
10354
Stephen G. Hall, “A Faithful Account of the Rac...
Historian Stephen Hall passionately engages in the history of nineteenth-century African American intellectual life in his first monograph, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (University of...
36 min
10355
Kevin Gray Carr, “Plotting the Prince: Shotoku ...
Kevin Gray Carr‘s beautiful new book explores the figure of Prince Shotoku (573? – 622?) the focus of one of the most widespread visual cults in Japanese history. Introducing us to a range of stories materialized in both verbal and visual narratives,
66 min
10356
Audra J. Wolfe, “Competing with the Soviets: Sc...
Audra Wolfe‘s new book, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (John Hopkins University Press, 2013) offers a synthetic account of American science during the Cold War.
49 min
10357
Landon Storrs, “The Second Red Scare and the Un...
Most people who listen to this podcast will have heard of Joseph McCarthy and HUAC (The House Committee on Un-American Activities). His activities and those of HUAC were, however, only the tip of a very large iceberg. In the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S.
61 min
10358
Steven Riess, “The Sport of Kings and the Kings...
In the classic 1973 film The Sting, Robert Redford and Paul Newman lead a team of con men in an elaborate scam to take revenge on a dangerous crime boss and a corrupt cop. The final play takes place in a high-stakes poolroom,
51 min
10359
Lois Rudnick, “The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel ...
The art salon is sadly less prevalent in our day than in days past, but it is far from obsolete. In its heyday, the salon provided people- particularly women Natalie Barney, orPerle Mesta)- with an extraordinary power to shape cultural tastes and conte...
49 min
10360
Joel Isaac, “Working Knowledge: Making the Huma...
Imagine the academic world as a beach. The grains of sand making up the beach are the departments, institutes, and other bodies and related gatherings that make up the officially sanctioned parts of academic institutions and academic life.
71 min
10361
Sanders Marble, “Scraping the Barrel: The Milit...
Sanders Marble, senior historian of the United States Army’s Office of Medical History, presents a collection of essays related to the problems of substandard manpower as defined at different times in Western militaries over the modern era.
59 min
10362
Sara Dubow, “Ourselves Unborn: A History of the...
59 min
10363
Christopher I. Beckwith, “Warriors of the Clois...
In Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012), Christopher I. Beckwith gives us a rare window into the global movements of medieval science.
80 min
10364
Colin Calloway, “Indian History of an American ...
Colin Calloway is one of the leading historians of Native American history today and an award- winning author. Calloway is the John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hanover,
24 min
10365
Carla L. Peterson, “Black Gotham: A Family Hist...
Digging up our roots seems to be the thing these days. There are a host of genealogy resources available for anyone who cares to (re)discover their familial past. Still, in the Americas people of African descent who want to take part in this digging ...
69 min
10366
Gil Troy, “Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight A...
The 1970s and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict are quite possibly the two most depressing subjects an academic could study. With shag carpeting, disco, Watergate, malaise defining the former and an internecine and (seemingly) eternal clash characterizin...
54 min
10367
Richard J. Smith, “The I Ching: A Biography” (P...
Texts have lives. They grow, travel, transform, fade, and are reborn into new and other lives. In The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2012), Richard J. Smith has given us a wonderfully readable (and assignable, and shareable,
72 min
10368
Chip Bishop, “The Lion and the Journalist: The ...
It’s a great advantage of a dual biography that one can draw attention to a significant life that might otherwise be unexamined by linking it to the life of someone famous. Such is the case with Chip Bishop‘s biography,
44 min
10369
Linford Fisher, “The Indian Great Awakening: Re...
Just east of the Norwich-New London Turnpike in Uncasville, Connecticut, stands the Mohegan Congregational Church. By most accounts, it’s little different than the thousands of white-steepled structures dotting the New England landscape: the same high-...
64 min
10370
David George Surdam, “The Rise of the National ...
This past October, David Stern announced that he would step down as commissioner of the National Basketball Association in February 2014. In Stern’s three decades at the helm, the NBA has seen its domestic fortunes rise and ebb.
46 min
10371
Meredith Roman, “Opposing Jim Crow: African Ame...
In December 1958, US Senator Hubert H. Humphery recalled that at some point during an eight hour meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier “tore off on a whole long lecture” that the Senator wished he could remember because it was “the best sp...
53 min
10372
James R. Hurford, “The Origins of Grammar (Lang...
Building upon The Origins of Meaning (see previous interview), James R. Hurford‘s The Origins of Grammar (Language in the Light of Evolution, Vol. 2) (Oxford University Press, 2012) second volume sets out to explain how the unique complexity of human s...
50 min
10373
Eliga Gould, “Among the Powers of the Earth: Th...
Many Americans tend to think of 1776 as the year when the United States began making history on its own terms. That is simply untrue. Building on recent scholarship that challenges this assumption is Eliga Gould‘s Among the Powers of the Earth: The Ame...
45 min
10374
Barak Kushner, “Slurp!: A Social and Culinary H...
I bet you’ve never heard of the “Smash the Baltic Fleet Memorial Togo Marshmallow.” I hadn’t either, before reading Barak Kushner‘s lively and illuminating new book on the history of ramen in Japan. Grounded in ample research that incorporates archival...
66 min
10375
Michael Gordin, “The Pseudoscience Wars: Imman...
When I agreed to host New Books and Science Fiction and Fantasy there were a number of authors I hoped to interview, including Michael Gordin. This might come as a surprise to listeners, because Michael is neither a science-fiction nor a fantasy author...
60 min