New Books in History
Episodes
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...
Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology" (Yale UP, 2023)
02 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century's most important ph...
D. J. Taylor, "Orwell: The New Life" (Pegasus Books, 2023)
02 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A fascinating exploration of George Orwell--and his body of work--by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to ...
Tony Spawforth, "What the Greeks Did for Us" (Yale UP, 2023)
01 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Our contemporary world is inescapably Greek. Whether in a word like “pandemic,” a Freudian state of mind like the “Oedipus complex,” or a repl...
Kathryn Cornell Dolan, "Breakfast Cereal: A Global History" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
31 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Breakfast Cereal: A Global History (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Kathryn Dolan presents the long, distinguished and surprising history of breakfast cereal....
Dejan Djokić, "A Concise History of Serbia" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
31 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dejan Djokić's book A Concise History of Serbia (Cambridge UP, 2023) covers the full span of Serbia's history – from the sixth-century Slav migra...
Lisa Silverman, "The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity After the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2025)
30 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In his influential Anti-Semite and Jew, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed "If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him." In...
Marion Gibson, "Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials" (Scribner, 2023)
30 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Witchfinder General, Salem, Malleus Maleficarum. The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenl...
Andrew Porwancher, "American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews" (Princeton UP, 2025)
29 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A scion of the Protestant elite, Theodore Roosevelt was an unlikely ally of the waves of impoverished Jewish newcomers who crowded the docks at Ellis ...
Lin Hongxuan, "Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic" (Oxford UP, 2023)
28 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In contemporary Indonesia the idea that Islam and Marxism are inherently incompatible has become deeply entrenched. However, as Lin Hongxuan's work U...
Lin Hongxuan, "Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic" (Oxford UP, 2023)
28 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In contemporary Indonesia the idea that Islam and Marxism are inherently incompatible has become deeply entrenched. However, as Lin Hongxuan's work U...
Sven Beckert, "Capitalism: A Global History" (Allen Lane, 2025)
27 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others,...
Ruby Oram, "Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
27 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 (U Chicago Press, 2025) historian Ruby Oram tells the ...
Aaron G. Fountain Jr., "High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America" (UNC Press, 2025)
27 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2025), Aaron G. Fountain Jr. hig...
Simon Avenell, "A History of Postwar Japan: Recovery, Prosperity, and Transformation" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)
26 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This sweeping history tells the story of contemporary Japan from its defeat in the Asia-Pacific War in 1945 until the early decades of the new millenn...
Riley Linebaugh, "Curating the Colonial Past: The 'Migrated Archives' and the Struggle for Kenya's History" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
25 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1960s, British colonial administrations in East Africa organized the systematic destruction and removal of secret documents from colonies...
Irvin Ibargüen, "Caught in the Current: Mexico's Struggle to Regulate Emigration, 1940-1980" (UNC Press, 2025)
24 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Migration between the United States and Mexico is often compared to the river that runs along the border: a "flow" of immigrants, a "flood" of documen...
Deanna Ferree Womack, "Re-Inventing Islam: Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Islamophobia" (Oxford UP, 2025)
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From the end of the American Civil War to the start of World War II, the Protestant missionary movement unintentionally tilled the soil in which Ameri...
Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French
22 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-sellin...
Michael Braddick, "Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian" (Verso Books, 2025)
22 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Christopher Hill was one of the leading historians of his generation. His work across more than 15 books and dozens of articles fundamentally rewrote ...
Terry Kirby, "The Newsmongers: A History of Tabloid Journalism" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
21 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Newsmongers unfolds the seedy history of tabloid journalism, from the first printed ‘Strange Newes’ sheets of the sixteenth century to the se...
Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025)
20 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
American conservatism as we know it today is a West Texas export, argues College of Wooster professor Jeff Roche in The Conservative Frontier: Texas...
Amy Erdman Farrell, "Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA" (UNC Press, 2025)
19 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When eight-year-old Amy Erdman Farrell moved with her family to Akron, Ohio, in 1972, she found herself adrift in a sea of taunting boys and mean girl...
Alexandra Ghiț, "Welfare Work Without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest" (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025)
18 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welfare Work Without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) argues that women activists, wage worke...
Maddalena Alvi, "The European Art Market and the First World War: Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910–1925" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and po...
John Tolan, "Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present" (Princeton UP, 2025)
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A concise new narrative history of Islam that draws on the transformative insights of recent research to emphasize the diversity and dynamism of the t...
David Nasaw, "The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II" (Penguin, 2025)
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In its duration, geographical reach, and ferocity, World War II was unprecedented, and the effects on those who fought it and their loved ones at home...
Katrina Navickas, "Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England" (Reaktion, 2025)
15 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A radical history of England, Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Katrina Navickas is a grip...
Mike Bird, "The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset" (Penguin, 2025)
14 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Land Trap (Portfolio / Penguin), Mike Bird—Wall Street editor at The Economist—reveals how this ancient asset still exerts outsize influe...
Jerry Moore, "Cat Tales: A History" (Thames & Hudson, 2025)
14 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For as long as cats have coexisted with humans, they have been feared, revered and respected. They appear as dynamic hunters in Palaeolithic carvings ...
Colm Murphy, "Futures of Socialism: ‘Modernisation', the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973–1997" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
13 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The transformation of the Labour Party by 1997 is among the most consequential political developments in modern British history. Futures of Socialism ...
Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts" (Yale UP, 2025)
12 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Medieval Europe was preoccupied with magic. From the Carolingian Empire to Renaissance Italy and Tudor England, great rulers, religious figures, and s...
Caitlin Wiesner, "Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime" (U Pennsylvania, 2025)
11 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in the 1970s, a series of government agencies established to carry out the federal “war on crime” offered financial and ideological supp...
Dan Edelstein, "The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin" (Princeton UP, 2025)
10 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Political thinkers from Plato to John Adams saw revolutions as a grave threat to society and advocated for a constitution that prevented them by balan...
Rachel Jean-Baptiste, "Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
10 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships...
David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people fo...
Gloria Browne-Marshall, "A Protest History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2026)
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Exploring 500 years of protest and resistance in US history—and how its force is foundational and can empower us to navigate our chaotic world In t...
Philip Janzen, "An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean" (Duke UP, 2025)
07 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2025), Philip Janzen traces the intellectual trajectories...
Michal A. Piegzik, "Gamble in the Coral Sea: Japan's Offensive, the Carrier Battle, and the Road to Midway" (Naval Institute Press, 2025)
07 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Driven by extensive Japanese primary sources, Gamble in the Coral Sea: Japan's Offensive, the Carrier Battle, and the Road to Midway (Naval Instit...
Ayoush Lazikani, "The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing" (Yale UP, 2025)
06 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When they gazed at the moon, medieval people around the globe saw an object that was at once powerful and fragile, distant and intimate—and sometime...
The Nursing Clio Editorial Collective, "The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
06 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice (Rutgers UP, 2025) brings together essays that examine reproductive heal...
Ali Anooshahr, "Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s)" (Oxford UP, 2025)
05 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admir...
Joseph Harley and Vicky Holmes eds., "Objects of Poverty: Material Culture in Britain from 1700" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
05 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Joseph Harley joins Jana Byars to talk about the book he edited with Vicky Holmes, Objects of Poverty: Material Culture in Britain from 1700 (Blooms...
Francis Gavin, "Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy" (Yale UP, 2025)
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In his timely, thought-provoking book Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy (Yale UP, 2025), Francis Gavin makes a powerful cas...
Sarah F. Derbew, "Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Derbew’s new book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) asks how should articulations of blackness from the fifth ce...
Taylor McCall, "The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Taylor McCall's The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe (Reaktion, 2023) is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustr...
Anne Irfan, "A Short History of the Gaza Strip" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Joe Williams speaks to historian Anne Irfan about her new book, A Short History of the Gaza Strip (Simon & Schuster, 2025). Drawing...
James Lacey, "Rome: Strategy of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2022)
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From Octavian's victory at Actium (31 B.C.) to its traditional endpoint in the West (476), the Roman Empire lasted a solid 500 years -- an impressive ...
Brooke Barbier, "King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father" (Harvard UP, 2023)
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father (Harvard UP, 2023) is a rollicking portrait of the paradoxical patriot, whose meas...