New Books in Economic and Business History
Episodes
Elliott West, "Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
23 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (U Nebraska Press, 2023) renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping nar...
Thomas Aiello, "Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
22 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Thomas Aiello joins E. James West to discuss Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott News...
Joel E. Correia, "Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco" (U California Press, 2023)
20 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Paraguayan Chaco is a settler frontier where cattle ranching and agrarian extractivism drive some of the world's fastest deforestation and most ex...
Kathryn Cornell Dolan, "Breakfast Cereal: A Global History" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
19 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Breakfast Cereal: A Global History (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Kathryn Dolan presents the long, distinguished and surprising history of breakfast cereal....
Charles Read, "Calming the Storms: The Carry Trade, the Banking School and British Financial Crises Since 1825" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Calming the Storms: The Carry Trade, the Banking School and British Financial Crises Since 1825 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) by Dr. Charles Read expose...
Quinn Slobodian, "Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy" (Metropolitan, 2023)
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Look at a map of the world and you'll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade...
Paul Kenny, "Why Populism?: Political Strategy from Ancient Greece to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The rise to power of populists like Donald Trump is usually attributed to the shifting values and policy preferences of voters-the demand side. Paul ...
Luca Zan, "The Venice Arsenal: Between History, Heritage, and Re-Use" (Routledge, 2022)
16 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Venice Arsenal: Between History, Heritage, and Re-Use (Routledge, 2022) reviews four decades of debate about restoring an industrial heritage sit...
Harold James, "Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization" (Yale UP, 2023)
15 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspe...
Nikhil Menon, "Planning Democracy: Modern India’s Quest for Development" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
13 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi closed the Planning Commission, which he accused of stifling the country’s growth and being a holdover ...
Amy Edwards, "Are We Rich Yet? The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain" (U California Press, 2022)
12 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How did British society become financialised? In Are We Rich Yet? The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (U California Press, 2...
Andrew Curley, "Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation" (U Arizona Press, 2023)
11 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed. This comprehensive new...
Tim Simpson, "Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China's Consumer Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
11 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A comprehensive look into how Macau’s recent decades of gambling-related growth produced one of the wealthiest territories on the planet. Betting on...
Kate Strasdin, "The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe" (Pegasus Books, 2023)
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe (Penguin, 2023) by Dr. Kate Strasdin presents the hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's l...
The Cooperative Extension System
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of High Theory, Karl Dudman tells us about the Cooperative Extension System. Formed in 1914 as an extension of the Land Grant Universi...
Dror Goldberg, "Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
09 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems--coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of...
Howard Gillette, Jr., "The Paradox of Urban Revitalization: Progress and Poverty in America's Postindustrial Era" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
09 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the twenty-first century, cities in the United States that had suffered most the shift to a postindustrial era entered a period widely proclaimed a...
Johnny Walker, "Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1978-92" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
07 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Nostalgia for the 1980s is in the air. From Stranger Things to the relaunch of 80s franchises like Top Gun, the American entertainment industry cas...
Alan Blinder, "A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021" (Princeton UP, 2022)
06 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Spanning twelve presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden, and eight Federal Reserve chairs, from William McChesney Martin to Jerome Powell, this ...
Sudha Rajagopalan, "Journeys of Soviet Things: Cold War as Lived Experience in Cuba and India" (Routledge, 2023)
04 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
At the intersection of history, material culture studies, and post-socialist memory studies, Journeys of Soviet Things: Cold War as Lived Experience ...
Katherine Johnston, "The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World" (Oxford UP, 2022)
03 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Oxford UP, 2022) interrogates how people with an interest in Afr...
Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management
03 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
JoAnne Yates, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management, Emerita and Professor of Managerial Communication and Work and Organization Studies at MIT’...
Julia H. Lee, "The Racial Railroad" (NYU Press, 2022)
01 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptional...
The Transformation of Livestock Herding in Socialist Mongolia
31 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1956 and 1960, leaders in the Mongolian People’s Republic embarked on a collectivization campaign to change the way in which Mongolians inte...
Divya Cherian, "Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia" (U California Press, 2022)
24 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2022) explores the question of what it m...
Weijian Shan, "Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Venture in China" (Wiley, 2023)
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2010, Ping An took over Shenzhen Development Bank, ending an experiment that had never been tried before, and not been tried since: a foreign compa...
Leon Wansleben, "The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism" (Harvard UP, 2023)
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
While central banks have gained remarkable influence over the past fifty years, promising more stability, global finance has gone from crisis to crisi...
Andrew Phemister, "Land and Liberalism: Henry George and the Irish Land War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
20 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Phemister is Research Associate at Newcastle University. He has previously held postdoctoral positions in History at NUI Galway, the University...
Chris Alden and Alvaro Mendez, "China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
19 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
China's role as an economic powerhouse in Latin America is reshaping a region on the cusp of development and change. Since the turn of the century, bi...
From China's Lost Generation to American Private Equity Professor
19 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Having lived through both China’s Great Leap Forward during primary school, then the Cultural Revolution and the closing of schools for ten years, B...
Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden, "Pioneers of Capitalism: The Netherlands 1000–1800" (Princeton UP, 2022)
18 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
During the Middle Ages, the Netherlands played a significant role in the emergence of capitalism, which led to the impressive Dutch Golden Age and pav...
Eric Porter, "A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport" (U California Press, 2023)
16 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What can an airport tell us about a city? Quite a bit, according to UC-Santa Cruz history professor Eric Porter in A People's History of SFO: The M...
Mareike Schomerus, "Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Violent conflict and its aftermath are pressing problems, particularly for international development initiatives. However, the results of development ...
Roger Biles and Mark H. Rose, "A Good Place to Do Business: The Politics of Downtown Renewal Since 1945" (Temple UP, 2022)
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The “Pittsburgh Renaissance,” an urban renewal effort launched in the late 1940s, transformed the smoky rust belt city’s downtown. Working-class...
Laura Kolb, "Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare" (Oxford UP, 2021)
14 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2021), Laura Kolb examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represen...
James W. Cortada, "Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments and Businesses" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
12 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For over twenty years, James W. Cortada has pioneered research into how information shapes society. In Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Rev...
Alberto García, "Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico" (U California Press, 2023)
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico (U California Press, 2023) offers an essential new history of the Bracero ...
Theresa Runstedtler, "Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation That Saved the Soul of the NBA" (Bold Type Books, 2023)
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation’s imag...
Ross Melnick, "Hollywood's Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World" (Columbia UP, 2022)
10 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and oper...
Chris Walley on Deindustrialization (EF, JP)
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On a blustery fall morning back in 2019, RTB welcomed Christine Walley, anthropologist and author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial C...
Xin Wen, "The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road" (Princeton UP, 2023)
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Many of us–who maybe aren’t historians–have an image of the Silk Road: merchants who carried silk from China to as far as ancient Rome, in one o...
The Future of the Silk Road: A Discussion with Tim Winters
07 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the project...
Claudio E. Benzecry, "The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (The University of Chicago Press, 2022) shows us how globalization works through the ma...
Joan Flores-Villalobos, "The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West India...
Nikhil Menon, "Planning Democracy: Modern India's Quest for Development" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
05 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Indian planning project was one of the postcolonial world's most ambitious experiments. Planning Democracy: Modern India's Quest for Development ...
Caroline Rusterholz, "Women's Medicine: Family Planning and British Female Doctors in Transnational Perspective, 1920-70" (Manchester UP, 2021)
04 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Who built the twentieth century birth control movement? In Women's Medicine: Family Planning and British Female Doctors in Transnational Perspectiv...
Marcus Rediker, "The Slave Ship: A Human History" (Penguin, 2008)
03 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British...
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
03 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We are in the midst of a new space race that pairs billionaire space barons with governments in an effort to exploit the cosmos for human gain. While ...
Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)
28 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some...
Mitchell Schwarzer, "Hella Town: Oakland's History of Development and Disruption" (U California Press, 2022)
26 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Oakland grew up on the shadow of the dynamo of the nineteenth century West, always the "other" city on San Francisco Bay. But as Mitchell Schwarzer,...
Claire Bond Potter, "Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy" (Basic Books, 2020)
25 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With fake news on Facebook, trolls on Twitter, and viral outrage everywhere, it's easy to believe that the internet changed politics entirely. In Pol...
The Future of Democratic Capitalism: A Discussion with Martin Wolf
24 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Does China show that capitalism works better without democracy? What can be done to secure the future of open societies in which there is wealth, tole...
Tara Zahra, "Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars" (Norton, 2023)
22 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on ...
The Business of the Early NHL
22 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Greg Marchildon interviews J. Andrew Ross about his book Joining the Clubs: The Business of the National Hockey League, 1917-1945 (University of Syrac...
David Bond, "Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment" (U California Press, 2022)
21 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
So much of what we know of clean water, clean air, and now a stable climate rests on how fossil fuels first disrupted them. Negative Ecologies: Fossi...
Michael Schiltz, "Accounting for the Fall of Silver: Hedging Currency Risk in Long-Distance Trade with Asia, 1870-1913" (Oxford UP, 2020)
20 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The second half of the nineteenth century is correctly known to have culminated in the emergence of the gold standard as the first truly international...
Anna Zeide, "US History in 15 Foods" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
20 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From whiskey in the American Revolution to Spam in WWII, food reveals a great deal about the society in which it exists. Selecting 15 foods that repre...
Zoe Adams, "The Legal Concept of Work" (Oxford UP, 2022)
19 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Why do we think about some practices as work, and not others? Why do we classify certain capacities as economically valuable skills, and others as in...
Zoe Adams, "The Legal Concept of Work" (Oxford UP, 2022)
19 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Why do we think about some practices as work, and not others? Why do we classify certain capacities as economically valuable skills, and others as in...
Anna M. Grzymała-Busse, "Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State" (Princeton UP, 2023)
19 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sacred Foundations. The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton University Press, 2023) argues that the medieval church was a ...
Geoffrey Jones, "Deeply Responsible Business A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership" (Harvard University Press, 2023)
18 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I interview Professor Geoffrey Jones about his new book Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership ...
Andrea G. McDowell, "We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush" (Harvard UP, 2022)
17 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When miners arrived in California seeking their fortune during the gold rush of the 1840s and early 1850s, they encountered a place with few existing ...
Helen Yaffe, "We Are Cuba!: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World" (Yale UP, 2020)
17 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced the start of a crisis that decimated its economy. Helen Yaffe examines the astonishing de...
Sarah Foss, "On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala" (UNC Press, 2022)
16 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
During the Cold War, U.S. intervention in Latin American politics, economics, and society grew in scope and complexity, with diplomatic legacies evide...
Historians Examine Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology
15 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Popp, a professor of history at Copenhagen Business School, and Jonathan Coopersmith, a professor (retired) of history at Texas A&M, talk about...
Brian Lander, "The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire" (Yale UP, 2022)
15 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire (Yale UP, 2021) is a multidisciplinary study of the eco...
Sarah Kunz, "Expatriate: Following a Migration Category" (Manchester UP, 2023)
15 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Who are expatriates? How do they differ from other migrants? And why should we care about such distinctions? Expatriate: Following a Migration Catego...
The History of Student Loans in the United States
14 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, talks about her book, Indentured Students: How Government-Gua...
Malcolm Harris, "Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World" (Little, Brown, 2023)
14 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesize...
Lisa Haushofer, "Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition" (U California Press, 2022)
14 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From Gail Borden’s meat biscuit to John Harvey Kellogg’s peptogenic foods for race betterment and Fleishmann’s yeast as both technology of empir...
American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D
13 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Eric Hintz, a historian and fellowship coordinator with the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution’...
Leigh Campbell-Hale, "Remembering Ludlow But Forgetting the Columbine: The 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike" (U Colorado Press, 2023)
13 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Remembering Ludlow But Forgetting the Columbine: The 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike (U Colorado Press, 2023) examines the causes, context, and legac...
James Raven, "The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book" (Oxford UP, 2022)
11 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 14 original essays, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from th...
John Goodlad, "The Salt Roads: How Fish Made a Culture" (Birlinn, 2022)
10 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Salt Roads: How Fish Made a Culture (Birlinn, 2022) by John Goodlad is the extraordinary story of how salt fish from Shetland became one of the s...
Andreas E. Feldmann et al., "The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration" (Routledge, 2022)
09 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration (Routledge, 2022) offers a systematic account of population movements to and from the region...
Energy Costs, Poverty, and Race
09 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Destenie Nock, an assistant professor in the Engineering and Public Policy and Civil and Environmental Engineering Departments at Carnegie Mellon Univ...
How a California Electricity Utility Caused Deadly Wildfires
08 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Journalist Katherine Blunt, who writes about renewable energy and utilities for the Wall Street Journal, talks about her new book, California Burning:...
Rowan Dorin, "No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe" (Princeton UP, 2023)
05 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in the twelfth century, Jewish moneylenders increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs of European authorities, who denounced the evils...
Thomas Poell et al., "Platforms and Cultural Production" (Polity, 2022)
04 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our co-hosts Aswin Punathambekar and Jing Wang discusses t...
Truth, Fiction, and Student Loan Forgiveness: A Conversation with Beth Akers
02 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With the Biden Administration's student loan relief coming down the pike, Annika sits down with Dr. Beth Akers, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterp...
Inventing American Telecommunications
01 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Historian Richard John, professor of journalism at Columbia University, talks about his book, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications, w...
Missing: Men at Work
31 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over six million prime-age men are neither working nor looking for work; America's low unemployment rate hides the fact that many men have dropped out...
Greg Brew, "Petroleum and Progress in Iran: Oil, Development, and the Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
31 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From the 1940s to 1960s, Iran developed into the world's first “petro-state,” where oil represented the bulk of state revenue and supported an ind...
Business in Socialist Hungary
28 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Philip Scranton, University Board of Governors Professor Emeritus of the history of industry and technology at Rutgers University-Camden, talks about ...
The Future of Computer Chips: A Discussion with Julian Kamasa
28 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Microchips are both important and in short supply. So how important? And what can be done to make them more plentiful? Also, what are the geopolitical...
The History of Electricity in Mexico
27 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In her detailed cultural history of technological change, Electrifying Mexico, Diana Montaño argues that ordinary Mexicans became electrifying age...
The Archaeology of Innovation
26 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Catherine Frieman, an associate professor of European Archaeology at the School of Archaeology, talks about her recent book, An Archaeology of Innovat...
Shaping Civilisations: The Sea in Asian History
26 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The ocean is more connective device than barrier, bringing together diverse topics, time-periods and geographies. It has linked and connected the vari...
The History of Temp Work
24 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Historian Louis Hyman, professor and director of the Institute of Workplace Studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations...
Ajay Agrawal et al., "Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence" (HBR Press, 2022)
24 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. The authors of the bestselling Prediction Machines describe what you can do to prepare....
Sharon Milagro Marshall, "Tell My Mother I Gone to Cuba: Stories of Early Twentieth-century Migration from Barbados" (U West Indies Press, 2016)
22 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Barbadians were among the thousands of British West Indians who migrated to Cuba in the early twentieth century in search of work. They were drawn the...
Liran Einav et al., "Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It" (Yale UP, 2023)
21 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Why is dental insurance so crummy? Why is pet insurance so expensive? Why does your auto insurer ask for your credit score? The answer to these questi...
David Collier and Gerardo L. Munck, "Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies: Insights and Methods for Comparative Social Science" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
21 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past 50 years, scholars across the social sciences have employed critical juncture analysis to understand how social orders are created, beco...
Helen Anne Curry, "Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction" (U California Press, 2022)
21 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction (U California Press, 2022), historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more th...
Jeff Fearnside, "Ships in the Desert" (Santa Fe Writer's Project, 2022)
19 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Many of us have likely seen photos of the Aral Sea, and the rusted Soviet-era ships, sitting in the desert with no water in sight. The Aral Sea is now...
Automating Finance
19 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sociologist Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, a professor at University of California San Diego, talks about his book Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engi...
Shoddy: Recycled Textiles in History
18 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Historian Hanna Rose Shell, a professor at University of Colorado, Boulder, talks about her book Shoddy: From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rag...
The Ideology of Innovation in India
17 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Science and Technologies scholar Lilly Irani talks her book, Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, with Peoples & Thing...
Michael Joseph Roberto, "The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940" (Monthly Review Press, 2018)
17 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 shocked and appalled a number of people, forcing a critical reevaluation of what was possible, and what we ought ...
The History of the Black Urban Working-Class in the United States
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Joe William Trotter, Jr., Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Founder and Director of the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the...