New Books in British Studies
Episodes
Jane Hwang Degenhardt, "Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage" (Oxford UP, 2022)
10 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colon...
Francis M. Carroll, "America and the Making of an Independent Ireland: A History" (NYU Press, 2021)
08 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On Easter Day 1916, more than a thousand Irishmen stormed Dublin city center, seizing the General Post Office building and reading the Proclamation fo...
Ben Burgis, "Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters" (Zero Books, 2022)
07 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters (Zero Books, 2022), Ben Burgis reminds readers about what wa...
Matthew Taylor, "Sport and the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Play, 1939-45" (Routledge, 2020)
04 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today we are joined by Matthew Taylor, Professor of History at De Montfort University, and author of Sport and the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Pla...
Curtis Runstedler, "Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
03 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Curtis Runstedler's book Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the different functions and ...
Angela Hui, "Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood Behind the Counter" (Trapeze, 2022)
02 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Food journalist Angela Hui grew up in rural Wales, as daughter to the owners of the Lucky Star Chinese takeaway. Angela grew up behind the counter, ...
The 10,000 Year Build-Up to Brexit: A Conversation with Ian Morris
01 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How did Britain become a global superpower? Historian and classicist Ian Morris thinks geography has a lot to do with it. Prof. Morris discusses his l...
Book Talk 57: Anne Fernald and Rajgopal Saikumar on Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" (1938)
30 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Virginia Woolf’s 1938 provocative and polemical essay Three Guineas presents the iconic writer’s views on war, women, and the way the patriarchy...
Corey Lee Wrenn, "Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain's First Colony" (SUNY Press, 2021)
28 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Irish vegan studies are poised for increasing relevance as climate change threatens the legitimacy and longevity of animal agriculture and widespread ...
David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, "The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951-1954" (UNC Press, 2023)
28 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning with the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry in spring 1951 and ending with its reversal following the overthrow of Prime Minister M...
Francesca Sobande and layla-roxanne hill. "Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
27 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to be Black in Scotland today? How are notions of nationhood, Scottishness, and Britishness implicated in this? Why is it important ...
Uther Charlton-Stevens, "Anglo-India and the End of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2022)
26 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It can be easy to think of colonies as having two populations: colonial subjects, and colonial overlords from Europe. It’s an easy narrative: one ha...
Wolfgang P. Müller, "Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215-1517" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
21 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Wolfgang Muller, Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215- 1517 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). From the establishment of a coherent doc...
The Future of the European Left
20 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Why is it so hard for left wing parties in the West to win elections? Some such as the UK Labour Party have headed to the centre. The history of Labou...
Marion Turner, "The Wife of Bath: A Biography" (Princeton UP, 2023)
17 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English ...
Stuart Carroll, "Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Stuart Carroll's Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023) transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 ...
Richard Davenport-Hines, "Conservative Thinkers from All Souls College Oxford" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)
15 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
All Souls College Oxford was one of the meeting points of English public intellectuals in the twentieth century. Its Fellows prided themselves on agre...
Restless Pilgrims: About CS Lewis
11 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David Bates, Catholic apologist and CS Lewis expert, reflects upon Lewis's conversion (how he was 'surprised by joy'), how his reason confirmed his fe...
Ciara Breathnach, "Ordinary Lives, Death, and Social Class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902" (Oxford UP, 2022)
10 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ciara Breathnach's book Ordinary Lives, Death, and Social Class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902 (Oxford UP, 2022) focuses on the evolution o...
Urvashi Chakravarty, "Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
07 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Urvashi Chakravarty excavates th...
On W. H. Auden
05 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1983, ten years after W. H. Auden’s death, the New York Institute for the Humanities organized a series of readings and discussions of his work....
The Bedouin and the Formation of Iraq's National Borders
05 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The British occupation of Iraq after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation of Iraq's national boundaries, a process with profound and...
Rebecca Binns, "Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism and the Avant-Garde" (Manchester UP, 2022)
02 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rebecca Binn's Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism and the Avante Garde (Manchester University Press, 2022) is the first book-length work dedicated ...
Jed Rasula, "What the Thunder Said: How 'The Waste Land' Made Poetry Modern" (Princeton UP, 2022)
28 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. "But," as...
Garritt van Dyk, "Commerce, Food, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England and France" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
26 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Garritt van Dyk talks about national identity, food, and cooking in this conversation about Commerce, Food, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Engla...
Anatoly Liberman, "Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
25 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Three centuries of English idioms—their unusual origins and unexpected interpretations. To pay through the nose. Raining cats and dogs. By hook or b...
Justin Dolan Stover, "Enduring Ruin: Environmental Destruction During the Irish" (U College Dublin Press, 2022)
24 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Justin Dolan Stover is Associate Professor of transnational European history at Idaho State University, where he teaches courses on war and violence, ...
Stephen Dobranski, "Reading John Milton: How to Persist in Troubled Times" (Stanford UP, 2022)
24 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
John Milton is unrivalled--for the music of his verse and the breadth of his learning. In this brisk, topical, and engaging biography, Stephen B. Dobr...
Michael Sturza, "The London Revolution 1640-1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England" (The Mad Duck Coalition, 2022)
23 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The London Revolution 1640-1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England examines the political upheavals that occurred during the reign of Charles t...
Elena Goodwin, "Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children's Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
23 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From governesses with supernatural powers to motor-car obsessed amphibians, the iconic images of English children's literature helped shape the view o...
John D. Wong, "Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s-1998" (Harvard UP, 2022)
22 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On July 6, 1998, the last flight took off from Kai Tak International Airport, marking the end of an era for Hong Kong aviation. For decades, internati...
Noémie Ndiaye, "Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
21 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) shows how the early modern mass media of ...
Clara E. Mattei, "The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual origins. For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to...
Fearghus Roulston, "Belfast Punk and the Troubles: an Oral History" (Manchester UP, 2022)
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Belfast Punk and the Troubles: an Oral History (Manchester UP, 2022) is an oral history of Belfast’s punk scene from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s t...
Carl Griffin, "The Politics of Hunger: Protest, Poverty and Policy in England, 1750-1840" (Manchester UP, 2020)
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were supposedly the period in which the threat of famine lifted for the peoples of England. But hunger r...
On William Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in history, and Hamlet is his greatest work. In Hamlet, Shakespeare gave us one of the first modern charact...
Jane Tynan, "Trench Coat" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Object Lessons is a Bloomsbury series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This interview focuses on Trenc...
Efram Sera-Shriar, "Psychic Investigators: Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism, and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022)
18 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Psychic Investigators: Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism, and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022) examines Briti...
Hester Barron, "The Social World of the School: Education and Community in Interwar London" (Manchester UP, 2022)
18 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Social World of the School: Education and Community in Interwar London (Manchester UP, 2022) shows why the study of schooling matters to the his...
Stephanie Decker, "Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History: British Multinational Companies in Ghana and Nigeria" (Routledge, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I interview Prof. Stephanie Decker about her new book Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History British Multinational Co...
Harvey J. Kaye, "The British Marxist Historians" (Zero Book, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The British Marxist Historians, originally published in 1995, remains the first and most complete study of the founders of one of the most influentia...
Joanna Newman, "Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945" (Berghahn Books, 2019)
12 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as Barbados, Trinidad, and...
Max Haiven, "Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2022)
08 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Palm oil is a commodity like no other. Found in half of supermarket products, from food to cosmetics to plastics, it has shaped the world in which we ...
On Virginia Woolf’s "Mrs Dalloway"
08 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 20th century, Europe and North America were undergoing a radical transformation. Scientific, technological, and political changes disrupt...
Gabriel Polley, "Palestine in the Victorian Age: Colonial Encounters in the Holy Land" (I. B. Tauris, 2022)
05 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode I have interviewed Gabriel Polley, winner of the Ibrahim Dakkak Award for the best essay published in 2021 by the Jerusalem Quarterly....
Jeremy Black, "A Brief History of the British Monarchy: From the Iron Age to King Charles III" (Robinson, 2022)
04 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The British monarchy is at a turning point. Concise and engaging, Jeremy Black's A Brief History of the British Monarchy: From the Iron Age to King ...
On Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre"
02 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Victorian era is known for its class rigidity and moral strictness. In her 1847 novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë gave us a robust, layered chara...
Jonathan R. Hunt, "The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam" (Stanford UP, 2022)
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford UP, 2022) reveals how a coalition of powerful and d...
Huw J. Davies, "The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War" (Yale UP, 2022)
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Wandering Army: The Campaigns that Transformed the British Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022), Dr. Huw J. Davies presents a compelling ...
Joseph Sassoon, "The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire" (Pantheon Books, 2022)
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Sassoons were one of the great merchant families of the nineteenth century, alongside such names as the Jardines, the Mathesons, and the Swires. T...
Trevor Jackson, "Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
30 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of Europ...
Paul Watt, "Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London" (Policy Press, 2021)
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It is widely accepted that London is in the midst of a serious housing crisis, manifested most obviously in city's soaring rents. While the causes of ...
On George Orwell's "1984"
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1948, English author George Orwell wrote what would become one of the defining novels of the 20th century, 1984. He was writing in the years follow...
Stephen Bourne, "Under Fire: Black Britain in Wartime 1939-45" (The History Press, 2020)
25 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Under Fire: Black Britain in Wartime 1939-45 (The History Press, 2020), Stephen Bourne tells the whole story of Britain's black community during ...
On George Eliot's "Middlemarch"
25 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
By the time we reach middle age, our lives have taken certain paths. Sometimes these paths are close to what we imagined in our youth. But more often,...
Stephen Galloway, "Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century" (Grand Central, 2022)
25 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A sweeping and heartbreaking Hollywood biography about the passionate, turbulent marriage of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. In 1934, a friend brou...
Aidan Enright, "Charles Owen O'Conor, the O'Conor Don: Landlordism, Liberal Catholicism and Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Ireland" (Four Courts, 2022)
24 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Aidan Enright holds a PhD in History from Queen’s University Belfast and is an Associate Researcher and Part-Time Lecturer in History at Leeds Becke...
Frans Camphuijsen, "Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe: Legal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York and Paris" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
23 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Frans Camphuijsen explored records from the law courts of York, Paris, and Utrecht and used them as a base for Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Eu...
Robert J. Savage, "Northern Ireland, the BBC, and Censorship in Thatcher's Britain, 1979-1990" (Oxford UP, 2022)
21 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Robert J. Savage is a professor in the Boston College History Department and served as one of the directors of the University’s Irish Studies progra...
What is the Future of Populism?
21 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The world's wealthier countries have in recent years faced challenges from right-wing populist parties and movements that may rejuvenate origins from ...
Deiter Reinisch, "Learning behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Ireland" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
18 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dieter Reinisch is a Government of Ireland Irish Research Council Fellow in the School of Political Science and Sociology, University of Galway, and a...
Gregor Gall, "The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer: Radicalism, Resistance and Rebellion" (Manchester UP, 2022)
18 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Joe Strummer was one of the twentieth century's iconic rock'n'roll rebels. As frontperson, spokesperson and chief lyricist for The Clash, he played a ...
Caroline Roope, "The History of the London Underground Map" (Pen and Sword Transport, 2022)
18 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Few transportation maps can boast the pedigree that London’s iconic ‘Tube’ map can. Sported on t-shirts, keyrings, duvet covers, and most recent...
Louise Ashley, "Highly Discriminating: Why the City Isn't Fair and Diversity Doesn't Work" (Bristol UP, 2022)
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Can we make the finance industry fair? In Highly Discriminating: Why the City Isn’t Fair and Diversity Doesn’t Work (Bristol UP, 2022), Louise ...
Michael A. Hunzeker, "Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front" (Cornell UP, 2021)
16 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front (Cornell UP, 2021), Michael Hunzeker develops a novel theory to explain how wartime milita...
David McDermott Hughes, "Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity" (Duke UP, 2017)
16 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity (Duke University Press, 2017), David McDermott Hughes investigates why climate c...
James Griffiths, "Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language" (Zed Books, 2021)
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity leaping towards extinction. The scie...
Melancholy
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of High Theory, Laura Stokes talks about melancholy. One of the four humors in ancient humoral medicine, melancholy, or black bile, is...
On H. G. Well's "The Time Machine"
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When H.G. Wells was growing up in England in the 1860s, science wasn’t part of education or everyday life the way it is now. Even though the 19th ce...
Nile Green, "The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen's London" (Princeton UP, 2015)
14 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In July 1815, six Iranian students arrived in London under the escort of their chaperone, Captain Joseph D'Arcy. Their mission was to master the moder...
Kedar Arun Kulkarni, "World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India: Poetry, Drama, and Print Culture 1790-1890" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
14 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1818, the East India Company defeated the Maratha confederacy, acquiring vast domains in central and western India. Through coercion if not outrigh...
Charles Read, "The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain's Financial Crisis" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)
09 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain’s Financial Crisis (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) is rich in archival detail and offers a ground-breaking analysi...
Aisha Khan, "The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2021)
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2021), Aisha Khan explores how colonial categories of ...
David Caute, "Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century" (Verso, 2022)
04 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is know chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who pos...
David Caute, "Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century" (Verso, 2022)
04 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is know chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who pos...
Erin Webster, "The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England" (Oxford UP, 2020)
04 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s guest, Erin Webster, is the author of The Curious Eye: Optics and Literature in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020). A bo...
On John Milton's "Paradise Lost"
04 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As a young student at Christ’s College Cambridge, John Milton announced to the world that he was going to write the greatest poem that the world has...
Andrew Fitzmaurice, "King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century" (Princeton UP, 2021)
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Eminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (1809–1897) was a model establishment figure in Victorian ...
Gurpinder Singh Lalli, "Schools, Space and Culinary Capital" (Routledge, 2022)
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Gurpinder Singh Lalli's book Schools, Space and Culinary Capital (Routledge, 2022) introduces the notion of culinary capital to investigate sociali...
Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus, "The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable" (Indiana UP, 2020)
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What can James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Keith Ridgway, Tana French, and Anne Enright tell us about Ireland’s culture of child sexual a...
Shaken and Stirred
02 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We couldn’t do a season on the Cold War without talking about Bond . . . James Bond. He was there from the beginning and has of course survived into...
David Kaiser, "Well, Doc, You're In: Freeman Dyson’s Journey through the Universe" (MIT Press, 2022)
02 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he we...
Ashley Sweetman, "Cyber and the City: Securing London’s Banks in the Computer Age" (Springer, 2022)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Ashley Sweetman works in cyber security for a London-based global bank and holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies at King’s College Lon...
Timothy Murtagh, "Irish Artisans and Radical Politics, 1776-1820: Apprenticeship to Revolution" (Liverpool UP, 2022)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Tim Murtagh completed his PhD at Trinity College Dublin. He was a historical consultant on the Dublin Tenement Museum at No. 14 Henrietta Street and a...
The Future of Money Laundering: A Discussion with Oliver Bullough
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How can you hide and spend billions of dollars? Many people hoping to do that go to London which is today considered the money laundering capital of t...
Tom Haines-Doran, "Derailed: How to Fix Britain's Broken Railways" (Manchester UP, 2022)
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why don't trains run on time? Why are fares so expensive? Why are there so many strikes? Few would disagree that Britain's railways are broken, and ha...
Ian Morris, "Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World--A 10,000-Year History" (FSG, 2022)
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World--A 10,000-Year History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), Ian Morris chronicles the eight-thousand-yea...
Matthias Bernt, "The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg" (Wiley, 2022)
28 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg (Wiley, 2022) provides an insightful institutionalist ...
Benjamin Parris, "Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care" (Cornell UP, 2022)
28 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In an exciting new book titled Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Parris shows how earl...
Ross Cole, "The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination" (U California Press, 2021)
28 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in f...
On Samuel Smiles' "Self-Help"
26 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help isn’t just an advice manual. It represents the invention of a genre, and not a moment too soon. Smiles was writing at a t...
Saskia Warren, "British Muslim Women in the Cultural and Creative Industries" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
26 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why is religion important in understanding creative industries? In British Muslim Women in the Cultural and Creative Industries (Edinburgh Universit...
Jennifer Lillian Lodine-Chaffey, "A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England" (U Alabama Press, 2022)
25 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Content Warning: discussion of execution gets a bit gruesome. Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey, A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution ...
Kenyon Gradert, "Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
25 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Modern imagination of the Puritans typically casts them in a repressive, conservative light. But that wasn't always the case. Abolitionist activists ...
Sara Wallace Goodman, "Citizenship in Hard Times: How Ordinary People Respond to Democratic Threat" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
24 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What do citizens do in response to threats to democracy? Citizenship in Hard Times: How Ordinary People Respond to Democratic Threat (Cambridge UP, ...
Eric Jay Dolin, "Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution" (Liveright, 2022)
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The bestselling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters reclaims the daring freelance sailors who proved essential to the winning of the Revolutionary Wa...
On Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations"
19 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, an investigation into the nature of wealth. Smith is now considered the Father of Capitalism or t...
Jeffers Lennox, "North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution" (Yale UP, 2022)
19 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The story of the Thirteen Colonies’ struggle for independence from Britain is well known to every American schoolchild. But at the start of the Revo...
John F. Lyons, "Joy and Fear: The Beatles, Chicago and the 1960s" (Permuted Press, 2020)
18 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For many, the Beatles offered a delightful alternative to the dull and the staid, while for others, the mop-top haircuts, the unsettling music, and th...
Jakob Feinig, "Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society" (Stanford UP, 2022)
17 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast Jakob Feinig introduces his ideas about how and when people's practices and institutions shape money and money creation. He provided d...