New Books in Economic and Business History
Episodes
Mark Peterson, "The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power" (Princeton UP, 2019)
14 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for...
Jonathan Connolly, "Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
13 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Jonathan Connolly traces the normaliz...
Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023)
12 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023) focuses on the intersections of three entities othe...
James D. Fisher, "The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
12 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The rise of agrarian capitalism in Britain is usually told as a story about markets, land and wages. The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agr...
Theresa McCulla, "Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
11 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor. In Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (U Chic...
Paul Rekret, "Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis" (Goldsmiths Press, 2024)
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The emergence of the popular music industry in the early twentieth century not only drove a wedge between music production and consumption, it also un...
William Gow, "Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community" (Stanford UP, 2024)
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This episode features a conversation with Dr. William Gow on his recently published book, Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of...
David Alff, "The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
09 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far b...
Laura Robson, "Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work" (Verso, 2023)
09 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When Americans and other citizens of advanced capitalist countries think of humanitarianism, they think of charitable efforts to help people displaced...
Jessie Abrahams, "Schooling Inequality: Aspirations, Opportunities and the Reproduction of Social Class" (Bristol UP, 2024)
06 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Despite a mass expansion of the higher education sector in the UK since the 1960s, young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds rema...
Jeremy Black, "A World History of Rail: From the Steam Regime to Today" (Amberley Publishing, 2023)
06 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There were 20,000 miles of railways in 1865 and about a million by 2020. Scale has always been a key theme in railway history. In the First World War,...
Amanda McMillan Lequieu, "Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt" (Columbia UP, 2024)
05 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still cal...
Racism as Power Relation: A Discussion with Adaner Usmani (EF, JP)
04 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-disc...
Daniel Susskind, "Growth: A History and a Reckoning" (Harvard UP, 2024)
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Susskind examines the brief and powerful history of economic growth and puts it into perspective with human prosperity in Growth: A History a...
John Soluri, "Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia" (UNC Press, 2024)
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalisation. Creatures of Fashion: Animals,...
Samuel Dolbee, "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I talk to Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and ...
Miranda Sachs, "An Age to Work: Working-Class Childhood in Third Republic Paris" (Oxford UP, 2023)
02 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Childhood as lived during the French Third Republic was very different from childhood during the modern era. Working-class children laboured alongside...
Michael Sonenscher, "Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word" (Princeton UP, 2022)
30 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What exactly is capitalism? How has the meaning of capitalism changed over time? And what’s at stake in our understanding or misunderstanding of it?...
J. Megan Greene, "Building a Nation at War: Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II" (Harvard UP, 2022)
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Building a Nation at War: Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II (Harv...
Simon Heffer, "Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars" (Penguin, 2024)
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Simon Heffer's book Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars (Penguin, 2024) is an astonishingly ambitious overview of the political, social and cult...
Saqib Khan, "Tribe-Class Linkages: The History and Politics of the Agrarian Movement in Tripura" (Routledge, 2024)
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Tribe-Class Linkages: The History and Politics of the Agrarian Movement in Tripura (Routledge, 2023) is a historical study of the development of ag...
Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston, "The Political Development of American Debt Relief" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
25 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A political history of the rise and fall of American debt relief. Americans have a long history with debt. They also have a long history of mobilizing...
Ann Johnson and Johannes Lenhard, "Cultures of Prediction: How Engineering and Science Evolve with Mathematical Tools" (MIT Press, 2024)
24 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A probing examination of the dynamic history of predictive methods and values in science and engineering that helps us better understand today's cultu...
Trish Kahle on the Labor History of Energy Systems
24 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Trish Kahle, Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University-Qatar, about Kahle's new project, "Po...
Christopher T. Conner and David R. Dickens, "Electronic Dance Music: From Deviant Subculture to Culture Industry" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
23 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Electronic Dance Music: From Deviant Subculture to Culture Industry (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) explores the subculture’s emergence as a deviant ...
Orazio Coco, "Sino-Italian Political and Economic Relations: From the Treaty of Friendship to the Second World War" (Routledge, 2024)
23 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sino-Italian Political and Economic Relations: From the Treaty of Friendship to the Second World War (Routledge, 2024) presents a comprehensive narr...
Allison Elias, "The Rise of Corporate Feminism: Women in the American Office, 1960-1990" (Columbia UP, 2022)
22 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From the 1960s through the 1990s, the most common job for women in the United States was clerical work. Even as college-educated women obtained greate...
Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, "The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market: Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
22 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market. Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971 (Cambridge Universit...
Sally Stocksdale, "When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate" (McFarland, 2022)
19 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In When...
Timothy G. Anderson and Brian Schoen, "Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond" (Ohio UP, 2023)
17 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Scholars working in archaeology, education, history, geography, and politics tell a nuanced story about the people and dynamics that reshaped this reg...
Hannah Forsyth, "Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
16 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008 (Cambridge UP, 2023) explores the rise of the pr...
John Soluri, "Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States" (U Texas Press, 2021)
16 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and ...
Laurence M. Geary, "The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting" (Cork UP, 2023)
15 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview, he discusses his new book The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting (Cork UP, 2023), a collection of interco...
Jessica Calarco, "Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net" (Portfolio, 2024)
15 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How do unequal societies function? In Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net (Portfolio, 2024), Jesscia Calarco, an Associate ...
Sidney Xu Lu, "The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
14 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sidney Lu’s The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868-1961 (Cambridge 2019) places the concept o...
Christopher William England, "Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
14 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Henry George’s Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as d...
Sudev Sheth, "Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
13 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Running and securing an empire can get expensive–especially one known for its opulence, like the Mughal Empire, which conquered much of northern Ind...
Chloe Wigston Smith, "Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" (Yale UP, 2024)
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the eighteenth century, women’s contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives. Their traces were recor...
Adam Berg, "The Olympics that Never Happened: Denver '76 and the Politics of Growth" (U Texas Press, 2023)
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you don't recall the 1976 Denver Olympic Games, it's because they never happened. The Mile-High City won the right to host the winter games and the...
Stephanie Ternullo, "How the Heartland Went Red: Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics" (Princeton UP, 2024)
10 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past several decades, predominantly White, postindustrial cities in America’s agriculture and manufacturing centre have flipped from blue t...
Kathleen Day, "Broken Bargain: Bankers, Bailouts, and the Struggle to Tame Wall Street" (Yale UP, 2019)
10 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Think that today's debates about the role of the Federal Reserve Bank, financial regulation, "too big to fail", etc. are new? Think again. Who should...
Elisa Camiscioli, "Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
09 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations (Cambridge UP, 2024) is an illuminating account of the cultural, social, and eco...
Mark Stoll, "Profit: An Environmental History" (Polity Press, 2022)
09 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Profit ― getting more out of something than you put into it ― is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored...
Financial Institutions and Enslavement
08 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this special episode, we talk to two authors about the role of financial institutions in enslavement. Sharon Ann Murphy, associate professor of his...
Jonathan H. Ebel, "From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California" (NYU Press,2023)
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California (NYU Press, 2023) tells the story of the federal government...
Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski, "The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The United States was an upside-down British Empire. It had an agrarian economy, few large investors, and no territorial holdings outside of North Ame...
Thomas Larkin, "The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society" (Columbia UP, 2024)
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What roles did Americans play in the expanding global empires of the nineteenth century? In The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of Britis...
Aaron Eddens, "Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa" (U California Press, 2024)
06 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Aaron Edde...
Elena Kochetkova, "The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology" (MIT Press, 2024)
05 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology (MIT Press, 2024), Elena Kochetkova examines...
Naosuke Mukoyama, "Fueling Sovereignty: Colonial Oil and the Creation of Unlikely States" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
05 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
European colonialism was often driven by the pursuit of natural resources, and the resulting colonisation and decolonization processes have had a prof...
Kyle Barnett, "Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
02 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smalle...
Daniel Rachel, "Too Much Too Young, the 2 Tone Records Story: Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of a Generation" (Akashic Books, 2024)
01 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Rachel's new book Too Much Too Young, the 2 Tone Records Story: Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of a Generation (Akashic, 2024) present...
Anthony Heath and Yaojun Li, "Social Mobility" (Polity Press, 2024)
31 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What is social mobility? In Social Mobility (Polity Press, 2023), Anthony Heath, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford an...
Anne Kim, "Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich off America’s Poor" (The New Press, 2024)
30 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Poverty is big business in America. The federal government spends about $900 billion a year on programs that directly or disproportionately impact poo...
Stephen J. Silvia, "The UAW's Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants" (IRL Press, 2023)
29 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The UAW's Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants (IRL Press, 2023) is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto W...
Tom Mueller, "How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine" (Norton, 2023)
29 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dialysis is a medical miracle, a treatment that allows people with kidney failure to live when otherwise they would die. It also provides a captive cu...
The Social Acceptance of Inequality
28 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode of International Horizons, Francesco Duina, Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Bates College and Luca Storti, Associate Profess...
Carola Binder, "Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
27 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, in Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy (U Chicago Press, 2024)...
Iris Moon, "Melancholy Wedgwood" (MIT Press, 2024)
26 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024) is an experimental biography of the ceramics entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood that reveals the tenuous relationshi...
American Innovation, American Vitality: A Conversation with Chris Buskirk
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How can we restore America's frontier spirit, foster innovation, and stave off decay? Chris Buskirk sits down to discuss his new book America and the...
Rob Drew, "Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable" (Duke UP, 2023)
20 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster encla...
Daniel P. Ott, "Harvesting History: McCormick's Reaper, Heritage Branding, and Historical Forgery" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
20 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Cyrus McCormick invented the revolutionary mechanical reaper in 1831...right? At least, that's how the story has been told for decades. In Harvesting...
Priya Satia, "Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
18 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution transformed Britain from an agricultural and artisanal economy to one domina...
Constantin Ardeleanu, "Steamboat Modernity: Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860" (CEU Press, 2024)
18 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Through a skillful combination of economic and cultural history, this book describes the impact on Moldavia and Wallachia of steam navigation on the D...
Joan E. Cho, "Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
17 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
South Korea is sometimes held as a dream case of modernization theory, a testament to how economic development leads to democracy. Seeds of Mobilisat...
Adriana Chira, "Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
17 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba's radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative p...
Kunal M. Parker, "The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
16 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kunal M. Parker explores the...
Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson, "Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade" (Harvard UP, 2024)
16 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China...
Rajrishi Singhal, "Slip, Stitch and Stumble: The Untold Story of Financial Reforms in India" (Viking, 2024)
16 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
India’s stock markets are booming. One calculation from Bloomberg puts India as the world’s fourth-largest equity market, overtaking Hong Kong, ...
Raghuram G. Rajan and Rohit Lamba, "Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity" (Princeton UP, 2024)
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The whole world has a stake in India's future, and that future hinges on whether India can develop its economy and deliver for its population--now the...
Liliana Doganova, "Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology" (Princeton UP, 2024)
14 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book D...
Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg, "The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism" (CEU Press, 2023)
12 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg to ...
Görkem Akgöz, "In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey" (Brill, 2023)
12 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey (Brill, 2023) offers a site-specific histo...
Denise Von Glahn, "Circle of Winners: How the Guggenheim Foundation Composition Awards Shaped American Music Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
12 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Founded in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation provides support to what their current website says are "exceptional individuals in pur...
Robert K. D. Colby, "An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South" (Oxford UP, 2024)
10 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery and, after a four-year struggle to become an independent slaveholding republic, died ...
Francesca Trivellato, "The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society" (Princeton UP, 2019)
05 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange...
Tanisha M. Fazal, "Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War" (Oxford UP, 2024)
05 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Decisions to go to war are often framed in cost-benefit terms, and typically such assessments do not factor in longer term costs. However, recent dram...
Patrick Humphries, "Cleopatra and the Undoing of Hollywood: How One Film Almost Sunk the Studios" (History Press, 2023)
04 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The astonishing behind-the-scenes story of the 1963 film Cleopatra and how it changed the face of Hollywood makes it one of the most fabled films of...
Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac, "The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality" (Harvard UP, 2023)
03 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In many countries, property law grants equal rights to men and women. Why, then, do women still accumulate less wealth than men? Combining quantitativ...
Jennifer M. Black, "Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the early nineteenth century, the American commercial marketplace was a chaotic, unregulated environment in which knock-offs and outright frauds th...
Andre Schmid, "North Korea's Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953-1965" (U California Press, 2024)
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Histories of North Korea typically focus on one man — Kim Il Sung — and one narrative — his grand rise to absolute power. Andre Schmid’s new ...
George R. Boyer, "The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain" (Princeton UP, 2019)
29 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generatio...
Sheilagh Ogilvie, "The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis" (Princeton UP, 2019)
29 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Guilds were prominent in medieval and early modern Europe, but their economic role has seldom been studied. In The European Guilds: An Economic Analys...
Michael De Groot, "Disruption: The Global Economic Shocks of the 1970s and the End of the Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2024)
28 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Disruption: The Global Economic Shocks of the 1970s and the End of the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Michael De Groot argues tha...
Adrian Tinniswood, "Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House" (Basic Books, 2021)
28 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the we...
John H. Cable, "Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi" (UP of Kansas, 2023)
28 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Historians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming—the “Southern enclosure movement”—...
John L. Sullivan, "Podcasting in a Platform Age: From an Amateur to a Professional Medium" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
27 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Podcasting in a Platform Age: From an Amateur to a Professional Medium (Bloomsbury, 2024) explores the transition underway in podcasting by consideri...
Steven C. Beda, "Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
26 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine an environmentalist. Are you picturing a Birkenstock-clad hippie? An office worker who hikes on weekends? A political lobbyist? What about a...
Sudev Sheth, "Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
24 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this colorful book, historian Sudev Sheth traces how a family of diamond dealers deployed wealth to play off political leaders and survive the coll...
Michael J. Graetz, "The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America" (Princeton UP, 2024)
23 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The anti-tax movement is "the most important overlooked social and political movement of the last half century", according to our guest Michael J. Gr...
Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange, "Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
23 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life (Reaktion Books, 2023) tracks the British love affair with pets over the last two centu...
Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles, "Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
23 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is everywhere in the New York metropolitan area. Founded in 1921, its portfolio includes airports, marin...
Gary S. Cross, "Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal" (NYU Press, 2024)
23 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Free time, one of life’s most precious things, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the pa...
John Tolan, "England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
22 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied importa...
Guido Alfani, "As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West" (Princeton UP, 2023)
19 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This provocative and interesting book has received considerable attention. Roaring reviews and interviews include The Financial Times (UK), The...
Jonathan Chatwin, "The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China's Future" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
18 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour has become a milestone in Chinese economic history. Historians and commentators credit Deng’s visit to Guangzho...
Liz Tregenza, "Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930-70" (Bloombury, 2023)
17 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930-70 (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Liz Tregenza seeks to revise the notion that wholesale couturiers were simply...
Steven Ujifusa, "The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I" (HarperCollins, 2023)
15 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over thirty years, from 1890 to 1921, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern Europe, arrived in the Unite...
Jeremy Black, "The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History" (Routledge, 2015)
14 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History (Routledge, 2015), Jeremy Black presents a compact yet comprehensive survey of slavery and its impact o...
100 Years of Radio in South Africa: Then and Now
11 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s book is: 100 Years of Radio in South Africa, Volume 1: South African Radio Stations and Broadcasters Then & Now (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)...