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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10401
Douglas Smith, “Former People: The Final Days o...
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian nobility numbered about 1.9 million people, or 1.5 percent of the population. The 1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War would all but obliterate this class, as many nobles were dispossessed,
51 min
10402
Pamela O. Long, “Artisan/Practitioners and the ...
Pamela O. Long‘s clear, accessible, and elegantly written recent book explores the ways that artisan/practitioners influenced the development of the new sciences in the years between 1400 and 1600. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences...
64 min
10403
Carl S. Yamamoto, “Vision and Violence: Lama Zh...
Lama Zhang, the controversial central figure in Carl S. Yamamoto‘s new book may or may not have participated in animal sacrifice, sneezed out a snake-like creature, and engaged in other acts of putative sorcery early in his life.
67 min
10404
Astrid Eckert, “The Struggle for the Files: The...
At the end of World War II, the Western Allies seized pretty much every official German document they could find and moved the lot out of Germany and often overseas. They had, effectively, taken the German past.
60 min
10405
Catherine Jami, “The Emperor’s New Mathematics:...
Challenging conventional modes of understanding China and the circulation of knowledge within the history of science, Catherine Jami‘s new book looks closely at the imperial science of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662-1722).
68 min
10406
Jennifer Hall-Witt, “Fashionable Acts: Opera an...
When I was young I liked to go to bars, especially bars where bands were playing. But when I got there, I often didn’t listen very carefully. And in truth, I wasn’t there to see the band; I was there to “make the scene,” which is to say see and...
54 min
10407
Jill Gordon, “Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic...
It’s traditional in Plato scholarship to divide his dialogues in various ways. One common division is a temporal one that distinguishes among early, middle and late dialogues. Another is by content: there are the so-called erotic dialogues,
61 min
10408
Joseph Crespino, “Strom Thurmond’s America” (Hi...
The 2012 presidential election might be closely contested but the battleground states are almost all exclusively outside of the Old Confederacy. Florida, Virginia, and, to a lesser extent, North Carolina might be contested but only because these states...
51 min
10409
Christopher Nugent, “Manifest in Words, Written...
Christopher Nugent‘s wonderful recent book will change the way you read. At the very least, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China (Harvard University Asia Center,
73 min
10410
Andrew Muldoon, “Empire, Politics and the Creat...
It was the last in a long line of ‘Acts’ designed to ensure better colonial governance for the Indian sub-continent. It was an Act which was vociferously opposed by, amongst others, Winston Churchill. It is the Act upon which the Constitution of modern...
66 min
10411
Christian Gerlach, “Extremely Violent Societies...
What if genocide scholars have been approaching the field the wrong way? When I first opened Extremely Violent Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2010), I was immediately struck by the immense depth of research and learning...
69 min
10412
Lawrence Wittner, “Working for Peace and Justic...
Lawrence S. Wittner‘s memoir is a retrospective of a life and career that has straddled between academia and social engagement. While many scholars adopt a detached perspective, Wittner has strived to integrate his research with action.
56 min
10413
Jennifer Guglielmo, “Living in Revolution: Ital...
There is exactly one strong woman in the movie “The Godfather,” and she’s not Italian. (It’s “Kay Adams,” played by the least Italian-looking actress alive, Diane Keaton.) Such is the stereotype about Italian women, at least in the U.S.
64 min
10414
Wendy Roth, “Race Migration: Latinos and the Cu...
During a Presidential campaign when the ethnic background of many major national figures and immigration in general has weighed heavily on the debate, Wendy Roth‘s new book, Race Migration: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race (Stanford Univ...
34 min
10415
David Brandenberger, “Propaganda State in Crisi...
Though most people would rightly consider capitalists to be the founders and masters of the science of “marketing,” communists had to try their hands at it as well. In the Soviet Union, they had a particularly “hard sell.” The Party promised freedom,
57 min
10416
Hugh Urban, “The Church of Scientology: A Histo...
What is religion? Who gets to define it? Why is defining something a religion such an important endeavor? What exactly is at stake in determining the status of religion? Like many people think, you may say “Religion is self evident – you just know it w...
55 min
10417
Laura Stark, “Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the...
Laura Stark‘s lucid and engaging new book explores the making and enacting of the rules that govern human subjects research in the US. Using a thoughtfully conceived combination of ethnographic and archival work,
56 min
10418
Qiliang He, “Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics...
Using the example of pingtan storytelling to reexamine the history of cultural reform in the People’s Republic of China, Qiliang He‘s new book integrates political history and performance studies to challenge some widely-held assumptions about the hist...
70 min
10419
Peter Hoffer, “Cry Liberty: The Great Stono Riv...
In Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (Oxford, 2010), Peter C. Hoffer offers a succinct and refreshing new look at the Stono slave rebellion of 1739, an event that has been the subject of much historical scholarship.
35 min
10420
Ben Shepherd, “Terror in the Balkans: German Ar...
With Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare (Harvard University Press, 2012), Ben Shepherd, a Reader at Glasgow Caledonian University, offers us insight into the complex and harrowing history of the German Army’s occupation of the fo...
46 min
10421
Elizabeth Reis, “Bodies in Doubt: An American H...
In August of 2009, the South African runner Caster Semenya won the 800 meter final in the world Championship leading by one minute. “Muscles bulging and triumphant hand aloft,” the news reported, “she crossed the line way ahead of the rest of the field...
64 min
10422
Samuel Morris Brown, “In Heaven as it is on Ear...
Every person must confront death; the only question is how that person will do it. In our culture (I speak as an American here), we don’t really do a very good job of it. We face death by fighting it by any and every means at our disposal. Why we...
59 min
10423
Stuart Henderson, “Making the Scene: Yorkville ...
You’ve probably heard of Telegraph Avenue (Berkeley), Harvard Square, The Village, and Haight-Ashbury. That’s where “the scene” was in the late 1960s, right? But have you heard of Yorkville? I hadn’t until I’d read Stuart Henderson‘s terrific social hi...
65 min
10424
Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining ...
Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were coming into being: the scientific method,
53 min
10425
Whitney Bodman, “The Poetics of Iblis: Narrativ...
The Qur’an is filled with stories. It chronicles the lives of prophets, the stories of believers and non-believers, and lays out the creation of the cosmos. However, the Qur’an’s narrative qualities are often overlooked. Recently,
63 min