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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10526
Carol Benedict, “Golden-Silk Smoke: A History o...
Carol Benedict‘s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011)is many things at the same time; among other things, it’s both an exceptionally rich account of an object (or set of objects) that were c...
86 min
10527
Vincent Carretta, “Phillis Wheatley: Biography ...
Few people can claim to have created a literary genre… Phillis Wheatley did. By the time she was twenty, her name- taken from the slave ship that carried her to America and the family that bought her upon arrival- would be known throughout the world.
50 min
10528
David Stahel, “Operation Barbarossa and Germany...
This week’s podcast is an interview with David Stahel. I will be talking to him about his 2009 work, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2009). One of our previous guests, Matthias Strohn,
61 min
10529
Diane Kirkby and Catherine Coleborne, “Law, His...
English common law is prevalent across large parts of the world; and all thanks to the British Empire. It was not just culture and commerce that came along to the colonies; English law, as Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne‘s new book, Law, History,
66 min
10530
Cynthia Wachtell, “War No More: The Antiwar Imp...
My favorite book as a teenager (and in fact the only book I ever read as a teenager) was All Quiet on the Western Front. I liked it mostly for the vivid scenes of trench warfare. Teenage boys love that stuff (or at least I did). But even then I...
65 min
10531
Amanda Smith, “Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Li...
“When your grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page.” That was the Medill family editorial policy and Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson embraced it enthusiastically. The granddaughter of the Chicago Tribune‘s founder,
59 min
10532
Erik Mueggler, “The Paper Road: Archive and Exp...
First things first: this is an outstanding book. In the course of The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011), Erik Mueggler weaves together the stories of two botan...
94 min
10533
Andrew Ritchie, “Quest for Speed: A History of ...
As several guests on this podcast have told us, sports have been fundamentally connected with the major developments of modern history: urbanization, class conflict, imperialism, political repression, globalization.
61 min
10534
Michael David-Fox, “Showcasing the Great Experi...
People who care about other places (and that’s not everyone) have always thought of Russia as a strange place. It doesn’t seem to “fit.” A good part of Russia is in Europe, but it’s not exactly “European.” Russia has natural resources galore,
69 min
10535
Adrian Burgos, Jr., “Cuban Star: How One Negro-...
The integration of baseball is most often cast in terms of black and white, but biographer Adrian Burgos, Jr.— a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign– is out to change that. In his new biography,
52 min
10536
Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese...
Marta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imagination in China to an account of the SARS outbreak of the 21st century,
83 min
10537
Simon Winder, “Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of ...
When I was fourteen I was faced with a difficult choice. I was dreadful at languages but knew that I had another two years of brain-aching pain ahead of me full of verb tables and conjugations. The choice was between pain in French or pain in German.
54 min
10538
Randy Roberts, “Joe Louis: Hard Times Man” (Yal...
“I’m sure if it wasn’t for Joe Louis,” acknowledged Jackie Robinson, “the color line in baseball would not have been broken for another ten years.” To Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis was an inspiration and an idol.
56 min
10539
Artemy Kalinovsky, “A Long Goodbye: The Soviet ...
It’s been twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed, and scholars still joust over its long- and short-term causes. Amid the myriad factors–stagnating economy, reform spun out of control, globalization,
64 min
10540
Hayes Peter Mauro, “The Art of Americanization ...
Anyone who’s turned on the television in the past several decades is familiar with the ubiquitous before-and-after picture. On the left, your present state: undesirable, out of shape, balding perhaps. Add ingredient X – maybe a fad diet or a hair trans...
50 min
10541
Tong Lam, “A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys ...
We tend to take for granted that we have bodies, that these bodies are knowable and measurable, and that we understand how to relate our own bodies to those of the people around us. To put it more simply: if I were to ask you how tall you were, how...
80 min
10542
Jean H. Baker, “Margaret Sanger: A Life of Pass...
Forty-five years after her death, the reproductive rights activist Margaret Sanger remains a polarizing figure. Conservatives attack her social liberalism while liberals shy away from her perceived advocacy of eugenics and her supposed socialist tenden...
62 min
10543
Michael Matheny, “Carrying the War to the Enemy...
Ask many military historians about the origins of American operational art and many will place it sometime after the Second World War. Conventional wisdom has long held that the American military only developed a rough understanding of operations – the...
53 min
10544
Eugenia Herbert, “Flora’s Empire: British Garde...
Horticulture is not an activity normally associated with Empire building. But Eugenia Herbert‘s book Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). But ‘garden imperialism’ was all too common in the Ind...
66 min
10545
Gerald Steinacher, “Nazis on the Run: How Hitle...
When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going into that cavity. That nerve’s already dying.”). There was “The Boys from Brazil” (“The right Hitler for th...
57 min
10546
Jarrod Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers: R...
“Ah, nostalgia is such an illness, and what a beautiful illness. There is no medicine for it! And thank God there isn’t.” This was how one of the Soviet Union’s most famous jazz singers and actors, Leonid Utyosov, concluded his memoirs.
59 min
10547
Stacy Schiff, “Cleopatra: A Life” (Back Bay Boo...
Aside from being aesthetically equated to Elizabeth Taylor, Cleopatra has not fared well in history. In her riveting biography Cleopatra: A Life (Back Bay Books, 2011), which is now out in paperback, Stacy Schiff establishes that this was primarily bec...
39 min
10548
Kariann Akemi Yokota, “Unbecoming British: How ...
The founding fathers–and mothers, sons and daughters–were British. Sort of. It’s true that they were subjects of the British crown, and that they looked, talked, acted and had the tastes of folks in London. But they were always different.
59 min
10549
Frank Wcislo, “Tales of Imperial Russia: The Li...
When it comes to Russia’s great reformers of the nineteenth century, Count Sergei Witte looms large. As a minster to both Alexander III and Nicholas II, Witte presided over some of the most important economic and political developments in the Old Regim...
81 min
10550
Philip Stern, “The Company-State: Corporate Sov...
‘Traders to rulers’ is an enduring caption insofar as the English East India Company is concerned. But were they ever just traders to start off with, and they eventually morph into mere temporal rulers unconcerned with the dynamics of the global econom...
66 min