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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10726
Stephen Kotkin, “Uncivil Society: 1989 and the ...
Why did communism collapse so rapidly in Eastern Europe in 1989? The answer commonly given at the time was that something called “civil society,” having grown mighty in the 1980s, overthrew it. I’ve always been more than a little uncomfortable with bot...
62 min
10727
Harvey Schwartz, “Solidarity Stories: An Oral H...
One of my favorite bumper stickers reads “Unions: the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend.” Indeed they did. Organized labor has had a rocky history in the U.S. It’s been hounded for leaning left, associating with mobsters, and being corrupt.
66 min
10728
Sarah Ross, “The Birth of Feminism: Woman as In...
I’ll be honest: I have a Ph.D. in early modern European history from a big university you’ve probably heard of and I couldn’t name a single female writer of the Renaissance before I read Sarah Ross’s new book The Birth of Feminism.
64 min
10729
Michaela Hoenicke, “Know Your Enemy: American D...
To Americans, Hitler et al. were a confusing bunch. The National Socialists were Germans, and Germans had a reputation for refinement, industry, and order. After all, many Americans were of German descent, and they surely thought of themselves as refin...
74 min
10730
Rebecca Manley, “To the Tashkent Station: Evacu...
By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving masses of people around. Large population transfers (to put it mildly) were part and parcel of buildin...
67 min
10731
Padraic Kenney, “1989: Democratic Revolutions a...
There are certain dates that every European historian knows. Among them are 1348 (The Black Death), 1517 (The Reformation), 1648 (The Peace of Westphalia), 1789 (The French Revolution), 1848 (The Revolutions of 1848),
59 min
10732
Stevan Allen, “Roaming Ghostland: The Final Day...
We like to think of countries as permanent fixtures. They aren’t. They come and go. In 1989, a place called the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany, was going. It was never really an “ordinary” place.
67 min
10733
Sally G. McMillen, “Seneca Falls and the Origin...
Think of this. From the origins of civilization roughly 5000 years ago to around 1900 AD, the condition of women did not fundamentally change. They weren’t “second class citizens.” Rather, they weren’t citizens at all.
60 min
10734
Jennifer Burns, “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Ran...
When I was in high school I had several friends who went to Wichita’s only prep school. They were nice guys, played D&D, andsaid they were “Libertarians.”I thought that “Libertarian” might have something to do with the library,
73 min
10735
Jack Greene and Philip Morgan, “Atlantic Histor...
This is the first in a series of podcasts that New Books in History is offering in conjunction with the National History Center. The NHC and Oxford University Press have initiated a book series called “Reinterpreting History.
65 min
10736
Peter Fritzsche, “Life and Death in the Third R...
Germans and Nazis. They were different things, right? I mean some Germans were members of the Party and believed all it said and some were not and believed none of what it said. True enough, but actually the relationship between the identity “German” a...
64 min
10737
Brett Whalen, “Dominion of God: Christendom and...
In the Gospels, the disciples come to Jesus and ask him about the End of Days. He’s got bad news and good. First, everything was going to go hell, so to say: “And Jesus answered . . . many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall...
54 min
10738
Lawrence Wittner, “Confronting the Bomb: A Shor...
In 1983, when I was in college, I participated in something called a “Die-In.” A group of us set up crosses on the commons and threw ourselves on the ground as if we were dead. The idea, such as it was, was to suggest that nuclear weapons were bad and...
56 min
10739
Peter Mancall, “Fatal Journey: The Final Expedi...
You’ve probably heard of the Hudson River, and you may have even heard of Hudson Bay. But have you ever heard of Henry Hudson? Well you should, and now thanks to Peter Mancall‘s page-turning Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson (Basic Bo...
64 min
10740
Kevin Kenny, “Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxto...
It’s hard to be a Christian. It’s even harder to be a good Christian. But being a good Christian on the frontier of Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century seems to have been next to impossible. That’s one possible gloss of Kevin Kenny‘s eye-opening new...
69 min
10741
Nick Reding, “Methland: The Death and Life of a...
In 1980 I left Kansas to go to college in Iowa. A lot of things caught my attention about Iowa, for example, that the people really are very nice. I also noticed that there were a lot of drugs. One of them was “crystal methamphetamine,
66 min
10742
Alexander Watson, “Enduring the Great War: Comb...
It’s a question I’ve long asked myself: Why and how did common soldiers fight for so long in the First World War? The conditions were awful, death was all around, and there was no real hope of a “breakthrough” that might bring victory.
62 min
10743
Leslie Schwalm, “Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race ...
You’ve heard of “Reconstruction,” that is, the reform of the South after the Civil War. But have you heard of “Northern Reconstruction?” Probably not. I hadn’t either until I read Leslie Schwalm’s superb new book Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Recon...
59 min
10744
Charles Postel, “The Populist Vision” (Oxford U...
Ever wonder where the term “populist” came from? It came from “Populism,” a nineteenth/early twentieth-century American political movement. Of course the Populists weren’t really the “Populists,” they were the “People’s Party.
57 min
10745
Susan Brewer, “Why America Fights: Patriotism a...
Like it or not, governments need to mobilize their populations in times of crisis and one of the ways they do it is to disseminate propaganda. Now this is uncomplicated if you are, say, Stalin and claim to know what’s best for everyone and control the ...
74 min
10746
Giles MacDonogh, “After the Reich: The Brutal H...
Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Germany, more specifically in a tiny town on the Rhine near Koblenz. The family I stayed with looked for all the world like typical Rhinelanders. They even had their own small Weingut where they...
66 min
10747
Thomas Wheatland, “The Frankfurt School in Exil...
I have a friend who, as a young child, happened to meet Herbert Marcuse, by that time a rock-star intellectual and darling of the American student movement. Upon seeing the man, he exclaimed “Marcuse! Marcuse! You have such a beautiful head!
73 min
10748
Benjamin Carp, “Rebels Rising: Cities in the Am...
When I was in college about a million years ago, we used to sit in bars and talk about the Revolution. Actually, it was this bar and something like this “Revolution.” Clearly nothing ever came of our planning (or drinking). But it wasn’t always so,
65 min
10749
James Banner, Jr. and John Gillis, “Becoming Hi...
When I was young, I remember going to my high school library (not to study, mind you) and thinking “Who the hell reads all these books? And who writes them?” Just a few years later I found myself enrolling in a graduate program in history to do both.
69 min
10750
Matthew Algeo, “Harry Truman’s Excellent Advent...
Memorial day is coming up, and maybe you are going to take a little car trip. It might even be a “road trip,” one of the great American enterprises (which isn’t to say other folks don’t take them, but Americans can rightly say they invented this genre ...
64 min