New Books in World Affairs
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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1976
Eliga Gould, “Among the Powers of the Earth: Th...
Many Americans tend to think of 1776 as the year when the United States began making history on its own terms. That is simply untrue. Building on recent scholarship that challenges this assumption is Eliga Gould‘s Among the Powers of the Earth: The Ame...
45 min
1977
Keri E. Iyall Smith, “Sociology of Globalizatio...
Globalization is one of those words we hear on an almost daily basis. The world today is interconnected in ways that would have been unimaginable even twenty years ago. It seems as if everyone knows what globalization is,
30 min
1978
Rachel Kleinfeld and Drew Sloan, “Let There Be ...
You wouldn’t know from the 2012 president race but the United States remains engaged in a fairly bloody conflict in Afghanistan. In addition to boots on the ground, we deploy scores of drones in Pakistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa to keep Al Qaeda a...
49 min
1979
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
1980
Nicole Hassoun, “Globalization and Global Justi...
Citizens of well-developed liberal democracies enjoy an unprecedented standard of living, while a staggering number of people worldwide live in unbelievable poverty. It seems obvious that the well-off have moral obligations to those who are impoverishe...
50 min
1981
Clifford Bob, “The Global Right Wing and the Cl...
Clifford Bob is the author of the new book The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (Cambridge University Press 2012). Bob is an associate professor of political science at Duquesne University.
37 min
1982
Minkah Makalani, “In the Cause of Freedom: Radi...
Minkah Makalani is the author of a new intellectual history on the efforts of early twentieth century black radicals to organize an international movement, one that would address both racial and class oppression around the globe.
65 min
1983
The NBS Summer Seminar: Understanding the Olymp...
The 2012 London Olympics are here. To mark the event, New Books in Sports offers another of its occasional seminar episodes. And as with any great seminar, you’ll be eager to tell people what you’ve learned.
144 min
1984
Timothy Grainey, “Beyond ‘Bend It Like Beckham’...
Two days before this year’s Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich, the top two women’s clubs in Europe played on the same pitch, at Munich’s Olympic Stadium, in the final match of the Women’s Champions League.
52 min
1985
Jessica Teisch, “Engineering Nature: Water Deve...
Jessica Teisch‘s new book Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) examines the ways that Californian engineers attempted to reshape their world in the la...
32 min
1986
John Fox, “The Ball: Discovering the Object of ...
There are a lot of balls in my house. Baseballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, footballs, basketballs, volleyballs. We have Wiffle balls, Nerf balls, and Super Balls. My children and I occasionally use the balls for their intended purposes.
50 min
1987
Phil Zuckerman, “Society Without God: What the ...
It is not uncommon for many Americans to believe that morality and order comes from God and religion. A society without these elements would consequently be immoral and chaotic. When Phil Zuckerman traveled to Scandinavia, however,
29 min
1988
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
1989
Peter Millward, “The Global Football League: Tr...
It’s the English Premier League’s birthday! On this day twenty years ago, all twenty-two clubs of the First Division resigned from the 104-year-old Football League and declared their plans to create a new, breakaway league.
63 min
1990
Niamh Reilly, “Women’s Human Rights: Seeking Ge...
Today, you can open your newspaper and find stories about mass rape in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, death sentences for adulterous women in Iran, or Central American women smuggled into the US for the purposes of sexual slavery.
74 min
1991
Andrei Markovits, “Gaming the World: How Sports...
“We live in the age of globalization, with the interconnection of markets, technology, and cultures making the world a smaller place.” Sure.Tell that to the guys on my local sports radio show. For them, the world is bounded by the Big Ten and the North...
66 min
1992
Dave Zirin, “The John Carlos Story: The Sports ...
There are beautiful sports photos, and dramatic sports photos. There are sports photos that are funny, and others that are poignant. There are photos that capture athletic brilliance, and tenacity, and passion.
61 min
1993
Robert Thurston, “Lynching: American Mob Murder...
It takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall of lynching in the United States. That orthodoxy holds that lynching in the South was a ‘system of social control’ in which whites used organized terror to oppress blacks.
63 min
1994
Anthony Penna, “The Human Footprint: A Global E...
One of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of “Big History” is that the distinction between geologic time and human time has collapsed in our era. The forces that drove geologic time–plate tectonics,
62 min
1995
Ricardo Duchesne, “The Uniqueness of Western Ci...
One of the standard assumptions of modern Western social science (history included) is that material conditions drive historical development. All of the “Great Transitions” in world history–the origins of agriculture, the birth of cities,
64 min
1996
Francis Fukuyama, “The Origins of Political Ord...
When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the book Montesquieu reduces a set of disparate, seemingly unconnected facts arrayed over centuries and continents into a single,
52 min
1997
Dan Drezner, “Theories of International Politic...
International theorists like to game out every possible scenario. What would happen if you applied their methodology to dealing with the fictional public policy challenge of a zombie infestation? In Dan Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and ...
42 min
1998
David Day, “Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm O...
People will often say that “this land”–wherever this land happens to be–is theirs because their ancestors “have always lived there.” But you can be pretty sure that’s not true. It’s probably the case that somebody else’s ancestors once lived on “this l...
57 min
1999
Joyce Appleby, “The Relentless Revolution: A Hi...
Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting to pop out.
57 min
2000
Fred Spier, “Big History and the Future of Huma...
My son Isaiah likes to play the “why” game. Isaiah: “Why is my ice cream gone?” Me: “Because you ate it.” Isaiah: “Why did I eat it?” Me: “Because you need food.” Isaiah: “Why do I need food?” And so on. Isaiah naturally wants to know why things are th...
61 min