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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10701
Jerry Muller, “Capitalism and the Jews” (Prince...
I confess I was attracted to this book by the title: Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, 2010). Capitalism is a touchy subject; Jews are a touchy subject. But capitalism and the Jews, that’s a disaster waiting to happen. I don’t suggest you try this,
68 min
10702
Ruth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and t...
If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bit of it and remember exactly where I was when the ver...
59 min
10703
Joanna Levin, “Bohemia in America, 1858-1920” (...
You’ve probably heard of hipsters. Heck, you may even be a hipster. If you don’t know what a hipster is, you might spend some time on this sometimes entertaining website. Where do hipsters come from? Let’s work backwards. Before hipsters (1990s),
60 min
10704
Heather Cox Richardson, “Wounded Knee: Party Po...
Of all the events in American history, two are far and away the most troubling: slavery and the near-genocidal war against native Americans. In truth, we’ve dealt much better with the former than the latter. The slaves were emancipated.
70 min
10705
Audrey Kurth Cronin, “How Terrorism Ends: Under...
It’s one thing to say that the study of history is “relevant” to contemporary problems; it’s another to demonstrate it. In How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns(Princeton UP, 2009),
58 min
10706
Fearghal McGarry, “The Rising: Ireland, Easter ...
Sometimes when you win you lose. That’s called a Pyrrhic victory. But sometimes when you lose you win. We don’t have a name for that (at least as far as I know). But we might call it an “Easter Rising victory” after the Irish Republican revolt of 1916....
66 min
10707
Jeffrey Reznick, “John Galsworthy and the Disab...
You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of the most popular and famous British writers of the early 20th century (the Edwardian Era).
56 min
10708
Greg Castillo, “Cold War on the Home Front: The...
If you grew up in the 1960s or 1970s in suburbia, you probably lived in a smallish ranch house that looked like this. That house probably had an “ultra modern” kitchen that probably looked like this. I grew up in such a house and it had such a kitchen....
66 min
10709
P. Bingham and J. Souza, “Death From a Distance...
Long ago, historians more or less gave up on “theories of history.” They determined that human nature was too unpredictable, cultures too various, and developmental patterns too evanescent for any really scientific theory of history to be possible.
66 min
10710
Andrew Donson, “Youth in the Fatherless Land: W...
I was a little kid during the Vietnam War. It was on the news all the time, and besides my uncle was fighting there. I followed it closely, or as closely as a little kid can. I never thought for a moment that “we” could lose. “We” were a great...
62 min
10711
Amy Bass, “Those About Him Remained Silent: The...
I asked my wife if she knew who W. E. B. Du Bois was. She did, as would most Americans. I then asked her if she knew where Du Bois was born and raised. She did not, and most Americans wouldn’t either. The odd thing is that Du Bois, who...
60 min
10712
Patrick Manning, “The African Diaspora: A Histo...
Africans were the first migrants because they were the first people. Some 60,000 years ago they left their homeland and in a relatively short period of time (by geological and evolutionary standards) moved to nearly every habitable place on the globe.
61 min
10713
David Laskin, “The Long Way Home. An American J...
One night my wife and I were on the road, staying in a hotel in I-don’t-remember-where. I woke up in the middle of the night to find said wife missing. Happily, I saw a light under the bathroom door. There she is, I thought. I fell back asleep. I woke...
62 min
10714
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Anti-Imperial Ch...
I’ve got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You’ve heard of him. He was a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. But he didn’t (as the stereotype would suggest) become a doctor, lawyer, professor or businessman. Nope,
62 min
10715
Joel Wolfe, “Autos and Progress: The Brazilian ...
Here’s something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe’s terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford, 2010): the United States and Brazil have a lot in common. Both hived off European empires; both struggled with slavery and its l...
64 min
10716
David Aaronovitch, “Voodoo Histories: The Role ...
In preparation for this interview I watched the documentary (that’s what the producers call it, anyway) “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup.” Of course it’s absolutely loony. In fact, it’s so loony that I began to wonder if the director, Dylan Avery,
68 min
10717
Charles King, “The Ghost of Freedom: A History ...
There’s a concept I find myself coming back to again and again–“speciation.” It’s drawn from the vocabulary of evolutionary biology and means, roughly, the process by which new species arise. Speciation occurs when a species must adapt to new circumsta...
69 min
10718
Hilary Earl, “The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen T...
Hitler caused the Holocaust, that much we know (no Hitler, no Holocaust). But did he directly order it and, if so, how and when? This is one of the many interesting questions posed by Hilary Earl in her outstanding new book The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgrup...
64 min
10719
Nicholas Thompson, “The Hawk and the Dove: Paul...
I met George Kennan twice, once in 1982 and again in about 1998. On both occasions, I found him tough to read. He was a very dignified man–I want to write “correct”–but also quite distant, even cerebral. Now that I’ve read Nicholas Thompson‘s very writ...
60 min
10720
Ben Kiernan, “Blood and Soil: A World History o...
Chimps, our closest relatives, kill each other. But chimps do not engage in anything close to mass slaughter of their own kind. Why is this? There are two possible explanations for the difference. The first is this: chimps are not programmed,
65 min
10721
Brian Balogh, “A Government Out of Sight: The M...
Americans don’t like “big government” right? Not exactly. In the Early Republic (1789 to the 1820s) folks were quite keen on building up the (you guessed it) republic. As in res publica, the “things held in common.
75 min
10722
Alan E. Steinweis, “Kristallnacht 1938” (Harvar...
One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, thought the former: he said that American culture made Amer...
69 min
10723
Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, “Natural E...
I remember telling my wife, the mathematician, that historians typically work on one time and place their entire careers. If you begin, say, as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (as I did), you are likely to end as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (...
60 min
10724
Julian E. Zelizer, “Arsenal of Democracy: The P...
Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to forget the “public” part and concentrate on the “intellectual” part.
65 min
10725
Toby Lester, “The Fourth Part of the World: The...
Why the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Lester‘s fascinating and terrifically readable new book The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth,
75 min