New Books in History

Sandra E. Greene, “Slave Owners of West Africa: Decision Making in the Age of Abolition” (Indiana UP, 2017)

28 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In today’s podcast we talked to Dr. Sandra Greene about her book Slave Owners of West Africa. Decision Making in the Age of Abolition published in 2...

Alice Wiemers, "Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana" (Ohio UP, 2021)

28 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Most development histories focus on large-scale projects and multi-year plans. But how would we understand development differently if we chose a diffe...

The Shtetl: Myth and Reality with Samuel Kassow

27 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Even those who do not know much Yiddish have probably heard the word “shtetl,” but what does that word mean exactly? Can we just say that it was a...

Sarah Jones Weicksel, "A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era" (UNC Press, 2026)

27 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

During the American Civil War, clothing became central to the ways people waged war and experienced its cost. Through the clothes they made, wore, men...

Leah Astbury, "Making Babies in Early Modern England" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

26 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Leah Astbury's new book, Making Babies in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2025), explores the ideals and realities that governed generation ...

Anna-Luna Post, "Galileo’s Fame: Science, Credibility, and Memory in the Seventeenth Century" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2025)

25 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

From the beginning of Galileo’s career, well before the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, his contemporaries took pains to shape his reputation...

Andrea Mansker, "Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2024)

24 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell UP, 2024) gives an historical account of the evolution of the matchmakin...

Martin Heidegger, "Being and Time: An Annotated Translation" (Yale UP, 2026)

23 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

A full century ago, a young and relatively unknown philosophy instructor in a small town in Germany would publish a book that would be swiftly picked ...

Lillian Guerra, "Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)

23 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Authorities in postrevolutionary Cuba worked to establish a binary society in which citizens were either patriots or traitors. This all-or-nothing app...

Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)

22 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A Histor...

Marc Masters, "High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape" (UNC Press, 2023)

22 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade the...

Sally Frances Low, "Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French" (NUS Press, 2023)

22 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In 1863 the French established a protectorate over the kingdom of Cambodia. The protectorate, along with Vietnam and Laos, later became part of the co...

Mark Thomas Edwards, "Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor" (Oxford UP, 2023)

22 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His "Today and Tomorrow" columns attract...

Jie-Hyun Lim, "Victimhood Nationalism: History and Memory in a Global Age" (Columbia UP, 2025)

21 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Nationalism today depends on the perception of victimhood. The historical memory of past suffering endows nationalist movements with political legitim...

Jeremy Black, "The Short History of Russia: Returning to Another Country" (Amberley, 2026)

21 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 began a new episode in history and was surrounded by a miscellany of historical claims. The Short History of Russia: ...

Ray Yep, "Man in a Hurry: Murray MacLehose and Colonial Autonomy in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)

20 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In Man in a Hurry: Murray MacLehose and Colonial Autonomy in Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2024), Ray Yep explores the latest available archival mater...

David Frankfurter ed., "Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic" (Brill, 2019)

19 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the midst of academic debates about the utility of the term “magic” and the cultural meaning of ancient words like mageia or khesheph, this ...

David King Dunaway, "A Four-Eyed World: How Glasses Changed the Way We See" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

19 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Eyeglasses have become so commonplace we hardly think about them—unless we can’t find them. Yet glasses have been controversial throughout history...

David M. Henkin, "Out of the Ballpark: How to Think about Baseball" (Oxford UP, 2026)

18 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

All over the world, masses of people watch, follow, document, and obsess over baseball. Everything remarkable about the impact of baseball derives fro...

Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)

18 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-impe...

Emily Dufton, "Addiction, Inc: Medication-assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

18 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

How the war on drugs created the gold standard treatment for addiction--until America's opioid crisis got privatized for profit, to the detriment of p...

The Far Edges of the Known World: A New History of the Ancient Past

17 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When Ovid was exiled from Rome to a border town on the Black Sea, he despaired at his new bleak and barbarous surroundings. Like many Greeks and Roman...

Brian Hallstoos, "Sol Butler: An Olympian's Odyssey through Jim Crow America" (U Illinois Press, 2026)

17 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

A superstar in both football and track and field Sol Butler pioneered the parlaying of sports fame into business prosperity. In Sol Butler: An Oly...

Cindy Schweich Handler, "A German Jew's Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany" (McFarland, 2025)

16 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Cindy Schweich Handler’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Redbook, The Huffington Post, and a host of ot...

Bin Chen, "Hui Muslims in the Shaping of Modern China: Education, Frontier Politics, and Nation-State" (Routledge, 2025)

16 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Chen examines the Chinese Nationalist government's distinctive support for private Muslim teachers schools between the 1920s and 1940s, and explores t...

Alex Alvarez and Richard R. Fernandez, "Lethal Elites: The Institutions and Professionals That Made the Holocaust Possible" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

15 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Lethal Elites: The Institutions and Professionals That Made the Holocaust Possible (Bloomsbury, 2025) is an eye-opening book highlights the role ...

Himanshu Prabha Ray ed., "Recentering Southeast Asia: Politics, Religion and Maritime Connections" (Routledge, 2026)

15 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Recentering Southeast Asia: Politics, Religion and Maritime Connections (Routledge, 2026) assesses the impact of European colonization in the late 1...

Amos Fox and Franz-Stefan Gady, "Multidomain Operations: The Pursuit of Battlefield Dominance in the 21st Century" (Howgate Publishing, 2026)

14 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In Multidomain Operations: The Pursuit of Battlefield Dominance in the 21st Century (Howgate Publishing Limited, 2026), Amos Fox and Franz-Stefan Ga...

Colleen M. Moore, "The Peasants' War: Russia's Home Front in the First World War and the End of the Autocracy" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)

14 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

During the First World War, Russia relied on the mass mobilization of its peasant population. In the summer of 1914, approximately four million peasan...

Marc James Carpenter, "The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest" (Yale UP, 2025)

13 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest (Yale UP, 2025) by Marc James Carpenter is a history book about hist...

Claire Morelon, "Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague, 1914–1920" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

13 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Prague entered the First World War as the third city of the Habsburg empire, but emerged in 1918 as the capital of a brand new nation-state, Czechoslo...

Kristin Roebuck, "Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War" (Columbia UP, 2025)

12 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In her book Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War (Columbia UP, 2025), historian Kristin Roebuck grapples with the question: Wh...

Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media" (Basic Books, 2022)

12 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lon...

Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022)

11 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1920s, Józef Piłsudski was a household name not just in Poland, but across Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean as well. Yet this complex and...

Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025)

11 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back (Princeton UP, 2025) shatters one of the...

Hilary French, "Ballroom: A People’s History of Dancing" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

10 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the early twentieth century, American ragtime and the Parisian tango fuelled a dancing craze in Britain. Public ballrooms were built throughout the...

Nancy Castaldo, "Squirrel: How a Backyard Forager Shapes Our World" (Island Press, 2025)

10 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Squirrels are a common sight, seemingly everywhere in wild and urban nature. Their chattering antics in city parks delight us while their raids on our...

Lucy Donkin, "Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages" (Cornell UP, 2022)

09 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Lucy Donkin’s Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2022) illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in...

Florian Wagner, "Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

09 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Florian Wagner about his new book Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982 (Cambridge UP, 2022). F...

Ian Smith, "Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

09 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Ian Smith urges readers of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, ...

Gloria Browne-Marshall, "A Protest History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2026) Revisited

08 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In December 2025, writer, civil rights attorney, playwright, speaker, and Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Glo...

Ann Komaromi, "Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society" (Cornell UP, 2022)

08 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the emergence and development of samizdat, a significant and distinctive phenomeno...

Thomas Kuehn, "Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

07 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Thomas Kuehn, Professor Emeritus at Clemson University talks about his new book, Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge University Press,...

Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025)

06 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed...

164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)

05 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet...

Jacqueline Riding, "Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London" (Profile Books, 2025)

05 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the hard streets: working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charl...

Andreas Killen, "Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War" (Harper, 2023)

04 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex...

Itohan I. Osayimwese, "Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage" (Princeton UP, 2025)

03 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts ...

Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class" (LIveright, 2023)

03 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contr...

Jessica Lake, "Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law" (Stanford UP, 2025)

02 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from "civilised" society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous...

Arnoud S. Q. Visser, "On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All" (Princeton UP, 2025)

02 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

A lively and entertaining cultural history of a supremely annoying intellectual vice Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downr...

Luca Cottini, "The Rise of Americanism in Italy, 1888-1919" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

02 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a pivotal time for the United States as the nation emerged as a political and industrial powe...

Michael Casiano, "Let Us Alone: The Origins of Baltimore's Police State" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

01 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The racist roots of modern policing in Baltimore By the early twentieth century, postbellum assaults on civil rights and the advent of Jim Crow expan...

Peter H. Wilson, "Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500" (Harvard UP, 2023)

01 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the...

Nicole Wegner, "Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

31 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Wegner is not a book about peacekeep...

Jovana Babović, "The Youngest Yugoslavs: An Oral History of Post-Socialist Memory" (Indiana UP, 2025)

30 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Youngest Yugoslavs: An Oral History of Post-Socialist Memory (Indiana UP, 2025) gathers interviews with members of the last generation to experie...

Saundra Weddle, "The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice" (Penn State UP, 2026)

28 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Saundra Weddle joins fellow Venetianist Jana Byars to talk about her pathbreaking new release, The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Tr...

Anna Reid, "A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution" (Basic Books, 2024)

28 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In A Nasty Little War: The Western Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution (Basic Books, 2024), award-winning reporter Anna Reid tells the extraordi...

Damon Scott, "The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco" (U Texas Press, 2024)

27 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively hist...

Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

26 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their milita...

Jorge Marco and Gutmaro Gomez Bravo, "The Fabric of Fear: Building Franco's New Society in Spain, 1936-1950" (Liverpool UP, 2023)

25 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Jorge Marco and Gutmaro Gomez Bravo's book The Fabric of Fear: Building Franco's New Society in Spain, 1936-1950  (Liverpool UP, 2023) deals compr...

Bradley R. Simpson, "The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025)

25 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The idea of self-determination is one of the most significant in modern international politics. For more than a century diplomats, lawyers, scholars, ...

Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914" (Oxford UP, 2023)

24 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Elizabeth Kelly Gray's book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America,...

Susannah Wilson, "A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France" (Cornell UP, 2025)

24 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Susannah Wilson joins Jana Byars to talk about A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell U...

Terence Keel, "The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence" (Beacon Press, 2025)

23 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they’ve sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd’s and Sandra Bland’s, ...

John M. Findlay, "The Mobilized American West, 1940-2000" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

23 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

At the end of the 1930s, the West was in peril. A cultural and economic backwater, the Great Depression had all-but wiped out the extractive industri...

Joseph Maiolo and Laura Robson, "The League of Nations" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

23 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Laura Robson and Joe Maiolo challenge histories of the League of Nations that present it as a meaningful if flawed experiment in global governance in ...

Kendra D. Boyd, "Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

22 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers a...

Jason Burke, "The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s" (Knopf, 2026)

22 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Jason Burke's The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s (Knopf, 2026) is an epic, authoritative, gripping account of ...

Brian D. Behnken, "Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935-2025" (UNC Press, 2025)

21 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

How police abuse ignited the Chicano movement in the Southwest Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest,...

Moritz Föllmer, "The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

21 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

What does it mean to see oneself as free? And how can this freedom be attained in times of conflict and social upheaval? In this ambitious study, Mori...

O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, "We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

20 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the spring of 1969, hundreds of workers, all Black and mostly female, went on strike at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital to ...

Tomer Persico, "In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea" (NYU Press, 2025)

20 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Tomer Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Rubinstein Fellow at Reichman University, and a Senior Research Scholar at t...

Sean Mathews, "The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East" (Hurst, 2025)

19 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Where does Greece belong? Many look at the ancient Greek ruins of Athens, and see the cradle of Western civilization. But much of Greece’s history a...

Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)

18 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth centuryA popular truism derive...

Giles Tremlett, "El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco" (Oxford UP, 2025)

17 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

From a scrawny, overlooked military graduate to the youngest general in Europe, Francisco Franco was known for his ambition, talent and calculated ris...

Rachel Midura, "Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe" (Cornell UP, 2025)

17 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Rachel Midura joins Jana Byars to talk about Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cornell UP...

Elwin Hofman et al. eds., "The Business of Pleasure: A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe" (Leuven UP, 2022)

17 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Elwin Hofman joins Jana Byars to talk about the volume he edited with Magaly Rodríguez García & Pieter Vanhees, The Business of Pleasure: A History...

Catherine Clarke, "A History of England in 25 Poems" (Penguin, 2025)

17 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, whi...

Jessica Kelly and Neal Shasore, "Reconstruction: Architecture, Society and the Aftermath of the First World War" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

16 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Reconstruction explores the impact of the First World War on the built environment - examining the immediate effects and aftermath of the Great War o...

Lottie Whalen, "Radicals & Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern" (Reaktion, 2023)

16 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Radicals & Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern (Reaktion, 2023) is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the to...

Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind" (Yale UP, 2023)

15 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Mike Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a provocative and original history of the scientists and writers...

Sam Fullerton, "Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England" (Manchester UP, 2026)

15 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Samuel Fullerton joins Jana Byars to talk about Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England (Manchester UP 2024) to celebrate its paperback release. I...

Helen J. Nicholson, "Women and the Crusades" (Oxford UP, 2023)

14 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The crusade movement needed women: their money, their prayer support, their active participation, and their inspiration. Helen J. Nicholson's book Wo...

Q. Edward Wang, "Staple to Superfood: A Global History of the Sweet Potato" (Columbia UP, 2025)

14 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Sweet potatoes were among the American crops Christopher Columbus brought back to Europe—where they were thought to be an aphrodisiac. In China, thi...

Susanna Elm, "The Importance of Being Gorgeous: Gender and Christian Imperial Rule in Late Antiquity" (U California Press, 2025)

13 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In this (open-access) book, Susanna Elm radically changes our understanding of imperial rule in the later Roman Empire. As she shows, the so-called ea...

Richard Fine, "The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany" (Cornell, 2023)

13 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany (Cornell, 2023), Richard Fine recounts the inte...

Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

12 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and c...

Robert D. Bland, "Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation" (UNC Press, 2026)

12 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The promise of Reconstruction sparked a transformative era in American history as free and newly emancipated Black Americans sought to redefine their ...

Bo Tao, "Cooperative Evangelist: Kagawa Toyohiko and His World, 1888-1960" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)

11 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Cooperative Evangelist: Kagawa Toyohiko and His World, 1888-1960 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2025) by Bo Tao uncovers the extraordinary world of ...

Stuart Carroll, "Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

10 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Stuart Carroll's Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023) transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 ...

Philip J. Stern, "Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism" (Harvard UP, 2023)

09 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Philip Stern places the corporation―more than the Crown―at the heart of British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed global empi...

Andrew S. Curran, "Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson" (Other Press, 2026)

08 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking...

W. Ralph Eubanks, "When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land" (Beacon Press, 2026)

07 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted fo...

Kerry Brown, "The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power" (Yale UP, 2024)

06 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the...

Theodore J. Karamanski, "Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan" (U Michigan Press, 2026)

06 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Theodore Karamanski joins fellow Lake Michigan enthusiast Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan. ...

Paul J. Gutacker, "The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past" (Oxford UP, 2023)

05 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bibl...

Alison Stone, "Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2023)

05 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thi...

Scott A. Mitchell, "The Making of American Buddhism" (Oxford UP, 2023)

04 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Scott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in...

Baijayanti Roy, "The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

03 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism (2024) is the first detailed and critical study of the intellectual and political connections tha...