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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10501
Heather Munro Prescott, “The Morning After: A H...
What would a Presidential campaign be without a good dose of reproductive politics? To be sure, many of us are surprised to see contraception, and not just abortion, called into question – but maybe that’s because the intensity of abortion politics has...
41 min
10502
Char Miller, “Public Lands, Public Debates: A C...
From illicit marijuana farms wedged deep in the canyons of the Angeles National Forest to the fire-bombed laboratories of the University of Washington, Char Miller takes readers on a wild romp through the contests, debates,
46 min
10503
Carolina Armenteros, “The French Idea of Histor...
When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Western history, at least for most folks. We also read,
53 min
10504
Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, “Dropping the Torch: ...
As a young, patriotic American, I was torn by the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. On the one hand, I knew already as an eleven-year-old, long before Ronald Reagan had uttered the phrase, that the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire.
61 min
10505
Richard Bourne, “Catastrophe: What Went Wrong i...
Much of the literature on modern Africa makes the unhappy comparison between hopes, especially upon independence, and reality. In Zimbabwe that link resonates even more than is normal. Zimbabwe only achieved full independence in 1980 after a brutal war...
48 min
10506
Philip Oltermann, “Keeping Up With the Germans:...
Few people are in a better position to assess different countries and cultures than those caught between them. So it is with Philip Oltermann: a German journalist who came to England while a teenager, and who has lived here and worked here ever since (...
48 min
10507
Karen Abbott, “American Rose: A Nation Laid Bar...
As a whole, the genre of biography trends towards linear narratives–wherein the events of a subject’s life are tracked in the order that they occurred. This makes sense, as it’s how we live our lives, but there are advantages that come with non-linear ...
37 min
10508
Marshall Poe, “A History of Communications: Med...
It is not every historian who would offer readers an attempt to explain human nature. In A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Marshall Poe does just that.
80 min
10509
David Edgerton, “Britain’s War Machine: Weapons...
My grandfather joined up when the Second World War broke out, but he was soon returned to civvy street as he was much more valuable employing his mechanic’s skills to fight the Nazis from a factory in Newcastle.
42 min
10510
Jan Plamper, “The Stalin Cult: A Study in the A...
Jan Plamper begins in his book, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Yale University Press, 2012), with two illuminating anecdotes that demonstrate the power and scope of Stalin’s personality cult. The first comes from Sergei Kavtaradze,
57 min
10511
William Kuhn, “Reading Jackie: Her Autobiograph...
Nearly twenty years after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, biographers are not only continuing to tell her story but finding provocative new ways to do so. In particular, a big bravo to William Kuhn for considering the former First Lady in a co...
47 min
10512
Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean, “Britain and th...
Nineteenth-century observers would say that the British Empire was an Islamic one; be that as it may, before Empire there was trade- and lots of it. Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean‘s book, Britain and the Islamic World,
66 min
10513
Jorg Muth, “Command Culture: Officer Education ...
This week we’re continuing our focus on the Second World War, as our guest author, Jorg Muth, chats about his recent book Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940,
76 min
10514
David Crowley and Susan Reid, “Pleasures in Soc...
We all know socialism failed in Eastern Europe and that failure reflected two great shortcomings: a lack of democracy and an economic system that consistently fell short in providing its ostensible benefactors, the workers,
60 min
10515
Jeff Sahadeo, “Russian Colonial Society in Tash...
Konstantin von Kaufmann, Governor-General of Russian Turkestan from 1867 until his death in 1882, wanted to be buried in Tashkent if he died in office; so that, he said, ‘all may know that here is true Russian soil,
66 min
10516
Robert F. Barsky and Noam Chomsky, “Zellig Harr...
Zellig Harris’s name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student, Noam Chomsky. However, much of his linguistic work has since fallen into comparative obscurity.
58 min
10517
Ann M. Blair, “Too Much To Know: Managing Schol...
Chewing on raw turnips and sand, keeping both feet in a tub of cold water, reading with just one eye open (to give the other a chance to rest) and sleeping only every other night: no, I am not describing the typical life of a pre-tenure professor tryin...
73 min
10518
Andrew Field, “Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabare...
“To think of Shanghai is to think of its nightlife: the two are synonymous.” From here, Andrew Field takes us on a dance across modern Chinese history, through its nightscapes and ballrooms, into the sprawls of its settlements and the pages of its pict...
86 min
10519
Carolyn Burke, “No Regrets: The Life of Edith P...
Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s. And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her lif...
43 min
10520
John Bloom, “There You Have It: The Life, Legac...
Howard Cosell was fond of saying that American television in the 1970s was dominated by three C’s, representing each of the broadcast networks: revered CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, NBC’s late-night talk show host Johnny Carson, and Cosell himself,
62 min
10521
Timothy Brook, “The Troubled Empire: China in t...
Tim Brook‘s The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010) rewards the reader on many levels. Though it provides an excellent introduction to Yuan and Ming history for both students and a...
87 min
10522
Suman Seth, “Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Somme...
Though Einstein, Planck, and Pauli have become household names in the history of science, the work of Arnold Sommerfeld has yet to reach the same level of wide recognition outside the field of theoretical physics and its history.
79 min
10523
Mia Bay, “To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of...
I can’t remember when I first saw one of those horrible photographs of a lynching, with crowds of white people, kids included, laughing and pointing at the mangled black body hanging from a tree. I do know that such images were part of my childhood men...
74 min
10524
Marcus Franke, “War and Nationalism in South As...
North East India is, as Marcus Franke’s War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas (Routledge, 2011) all too convincingly demonstrates, often considered peripheral to ‘India (or even South Asia) proper.’ A densely wooded,
66 min
10525
Robert Holland, “Blue Water Empire: the British...
I have always found something distinctly ‘un-British’ about the Mediterranean. I grew up thinking of the British empire – and British spirit – as being founded upon the open ocean: unconfined, stormy and there to be mastered.
47 min