New Books in History

Kalathmika Natarajan, "Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67" (Oxford UP, 2026)

02 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Over the centuries, millions of migrant labourers sailed from the Indian subcontinent, across the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, to shape what is now...

Cynthia Paces, "Prague: The Heart of Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

02 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of the CEU Review of Books Podcast, I sat down with Cynthia Paces to talk about her new book, Prague: The Heart of Europe (Oxford U...

C. Yamini Krishna, "Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

01 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is about the reciprocal relationship betwe...

Anthony Tucker-Jones, "The Secret War: Spies, Lies and the Art of Deception in World War II" (Sirius, 2025)

30 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Written by British former intelligence officer, Anthony Tucker-Jones, this fascinating, illustrated guide takes a deep dive into the secret operation...

Elissa Bemporad, "Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: Revolution, Civil War, and New Ways of Life, 1917–1930, Vol. 1" (NYU Press, 2025)

30 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Chronicles the encounter of one of the largest Jewish communities in the world with war, revolution, and Soviet power from 1917 through 1930 At the b...

Paula Oppermann, "Thunder Cross: Fascist Antisemitism in Twentieth-Century Latvia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)

29 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Founded in 1932, the Pērkonkrusts ("Thunder Cross") was the largest and most prominent right-wing political party in Latvia in the early twentieth ce...

Amanda Laury Kleintop, "Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

29 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

During the Civil War, the U.S. federal government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white South’s wealth by nearly 50...

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

28 Oct 2025

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 mo...

Kenneth G. Appold, "Luther and the Peasants: Religion, Ritual, and the Revolt Of 1525" (Oxford UP, 2025)

28 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Kenneth G. Appold joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Luther and the Peasants: Religion, Ritual, and the Revolt of 1525 (Oxford UP, 2025). ...

Deana Heath, "Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India" (Oxford UP, 2021)

27 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bod...

Mark Mazower, "On Antisemitism: A Word in History" (Penguin Press, 2025)

26 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What do we mean when we talk about antisemitism? A thoughtful, vital new intervention from the award-winning historian. For most of history, antisemit...

Stephen Fritz, "The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader" (Yale UP, 2018)

26 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In his new book, The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader (Yale University Press, 2018), Stephen Fritz professor of history at East Tennessee St...

Ashley D. Farmer, "Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore" (Pantheon, 2025)

25 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the world of Black radical politics, the name Audley Moore commands unquestioned respect. Across the nine decades of her life, Queen Mother Moore d...

Anthony Valerio, "Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor" (Zantedeschi Books, 2019)

25 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Though his advice has saved the lives of millions of people, the name Ignaz Semmelweis is not one commonly known today. In his book Anthony Valerio’...

Selena Daly, "Emigrant Soldiers: Mobilising Italians Abroad in the First World War" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

24 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

During the First World War, over 300,000 Italian emigrants returned to Italy from around the world to perform their conscripted military service, a ma...

Paul Galvez, "Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting" (Yale UP, 2022)

24 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and ...

Danny Orbach, "Plots Against Hitler" (Mariner, 2016)

23 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In his new book, Plots Against Hitler (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Danny Orbach, Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusal...

Cristina Plamadeala, "Dossierveillance, Collaboration, and Fear in Society: The Saga of a Journey Through the Securitate Archives and Beyond" (Routledge, 2025)

23 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Exploring the cultural history of surveillance practices of the Securitate, Romania's secret police during its communist period, the book blends biogr...

Becky M. Nicolaides, "The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945" (Oxford UP, 2024)

22 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The adoption of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965, triggered a wave of immigration to the U.S. not seen since before the First World War. But these newcomer...

Angelos Chaniotis, "Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian" (Harvard UP, 2018)

22 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander...

Martyn Whittock, "Vikings in the East: From Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin – The Origins of a Contested Legacy in Russia and Ukraine" (Biteback, 2025)

21 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Western Europe, we typically associate Vikings with the storm-tossed waters of the North Sea and the North Atlantic, the deep Scandinavian fjords a...

Peter D. Blackmer, "Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers" (UVA Press, 2025)

21 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers (UVA Press, 2025) explores the local dynamics, natio...

The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit

20 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit—especially apples. ...

William Doyle, "Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

19 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book Will...

David Stasavage, "The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today" (Princeton UP, 2020)

18 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Globa...

Lorenzo Castellani, "Alberto Beneduce, Mussolini's Technocrat: Power, Knowledge, and Institutions in Fascist Italy" (Routledge, 2025)

18 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Should "good" people work for authoritarians? Does their implicit endorsement do more harm than their replacement by someone potentially worse? This w...

Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)

17 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton UP, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief th...

Andrea Freeman, "Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch" (Metropolitan Books, 2024)

17 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The first and definitive history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black...

Julia Ross Cummiskey, "Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global" (Ohio UP, 2024)

16 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global (Ohio UP, 2024) presents the stories of scientists at the Uganda Virus Research...

Karl Ittmann, "Fuelling Empire: The British Imperial Oil Complex, 1886-1945" (Oxford UP, 2025)

14 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, British companies used the resources of empire to create an imperial oil industry that controlled 20% of glo...

Kathryn Hurlock, "Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World" (Profile, 2025)

14 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This year, as they have for millennia, many people around the world will set out on pilgrimages. But these are not only journeys of personal and spiri...

Justin Stover and George Woudhuysen, "The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

14 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This book rediscovers a lost history of the Roman Empire, written by Sextus Aurelius Victor (ca. 320-390) and demonstrates for the first time both the...

Darren Mueller, "At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz" (Duke UP, 2024)

13 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and producti...

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

12 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fa...

Lawrence Grossman, "Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945-2025" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)

12 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In American Judaism today, Orthodoxy is the fastest growing movement. However, Orthodoxy is anything but monolithic. Living in Both Worlds: Modern Or...

Matthias Egeler, "Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld" (Yale UP, 2025)

11 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Originating in Norse and Celtic mythologies, elves and fairies are a firmly established part of Western popular culture. Since the days of the Vikings...

Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson, "A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899-1911" (Brill, 2025)

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899-1911 is an encyclopaedic reference work doc...

John R. Davis, "Keep Your Ear to the Ground: A History of Punk Fanzines in Washington, DC" (Georgetown UP, 2025)

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

John R. Davis's Keep Your Ear to the Ground (Georgetown University Press, 2025) is the first history of the fanzines that emerged from Washington, D...

What is Free Speech with Fara Dabhoiwala

09 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The speech debates have not abated, and it’s clear that invoking the First Amendment, and the importance of free speech for democracy, does not sett...

Maria Fedorova, "Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)

09 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935 (Northern Illinois UP, 2025) examines the US and Soviet exchange ...

Aram G. Sarkisian, "Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era" (NYU Press, 2025)

08 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era (NYU Press, 2025) is an Immigration and labor history o...

Miranda Spieler, "Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories" (Harvard UP, 2025)

08 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pict...

Katherine J. Parkin, "The Abortion Market: Buying and Selling Access in the Era Before Roe" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The abortion market was a powerful economic force in American life. Before legalization lowered the cost, one million women each year collectively pai...

Andrew Lambert, "No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One" (Yale UP, 2025)

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How, for just over a century, Britain ensured it would not face another Napoleon Bonaparte--manipulating European powers while building a global marit...

Marion Orr, "House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr." (UNC Press, 2025)

06 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922-1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1...

Xiaobo Lü, "Domination and Mobilization: The Rise and Fall of Political Parties in China's Republican Era" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

06 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How and why did the Chinese Communist Party rise to power in the 1940s at the expense of its Nationalist (KMT) rival? In his new book, Domination and...

David M. Whitford, "The Making of a Reformation Man: Martin Luther and the Construction of Masculinity" (Routledge, 2025)

05 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

David Whitford joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, The Making of a Reformation Man: Martin Luther and the Construction of Masculinity (Routl...

Georgios Varouxakis, "The West: The History of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2025)

04 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How did “the West” come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did “Westerners” begin ...

Jamal J. Elias, "After Rumi: The Mevlevis and Their World" (Harvard UP, 2025)

03 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jamal J. Elias' new book After Rumi: The Mevlevis & Their World (Harvard UP, 2025) takes us on a historical journey through the development of the M...

Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

02 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Kathleen Casey joins Jana Byars to talk about The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford UP, 2025). Purses and bags...

Kathryn Dyt, "The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)

01 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When we think about the way that Southeast Asian rulers governed their kingdoms, we usually think of the relationship between the rulers and the peopl...

Branka Bogdan, "The New Yugoslav Woman: Reproductive Regulation in Socialist Yugoslavia" (Indiana UP, 2025)

30 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From 1945 to 1989, the Yugoslav state connected its claims of progressive politics and gender equality to its support of free healthcare, sex educatio...

Jennifer Barry, "Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination" (U California Press, 2025)

29 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gender Violence in Late Antiquity confronts the violent ideological frameworks underpinning the early Christian imagination, arguing that gender-based...

Mary E. Hicks, "Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2025)

26 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every...

Elizabeth E. Imber, "Uncertain Empire: Jews, Nationalism, and the Fate of British Imperialism" (Stanford UP, 2025)

26 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Following the British conquest of Ottoman Palestine, Jews across the British Empire—from Jerusalem to Johannesburg, London to Calcutta—found thems...

Jonn Elledge, "A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps" (Experiment, 2024)

25 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this eye-opening investigation into the most remarkable points on the map, a single boundary might, upon closer inspection, reveal eons of history—...

Deborah Willis, "The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship" (NYU Press, 2025)

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A stunning collection of stoic portraits and intimate ephemera from the lives of Black Civil War soldiers Though both the Union and Confederate armie...

Adrian Pole, "Making Antifascist War: The International Brigades' Transnational Encounters with Civil-War Spain, 1936-1939" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Making Antifascist War: The International Brigades' Transnational Encounters with Civil-War Spain, 1936-1939 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is a study of the 3...

Valerie Schutte and Jessica S. Hower eds., "Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Re-making of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

23 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Re-making of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) explores (mis)representations of tw...

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, "More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy" (Harper, 2025)

23 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and t...

Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025)

22 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated a...

Calvin Schermerhorn, "The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made" (Yale UP, 2025)

21 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. J Calvin Schermerhorn is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Hi...

Tanja Petrovic, "Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army" (Duke UP, 2024)

21 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The compulsory service for young men in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) created bonds across ethnic, religious, and social lines. These bonds persi...

Marcus Rediker, "Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea" (Penguin Group, 2025)

20 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Conspiracy, mutiny and liberation on America’s waterfront by the award-winning author of The Slave Ship. Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History o...

Jack Hartnell, "Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image" (Princeton UP, 2025)

19 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Wound Man—a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely acr...

I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom

18 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery,” declared Jean‑Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the mos...

Celene Reynolds, "Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX" (Princeton UP, 2025)

16 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When the US Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, no one expected it to become a prominent tool for confronting sexual harass...

Jessica B. Harris, "Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine" (Clarkson Potter, 2025)

16 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Discover the sweeping story of how Indigenous, European, and African traditions intertwined to form an entirely new cuisine, with over 90 recipes for ...

Owen Rees, "The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization" (Norton, 2025)

15 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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

Kevin Passmore, "The Maginot Line: A New History of the Fall of France" (Yale UP, 2025)

13 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone e...

The High Frontier: Gerard O’Neill’s Space Utopia

13 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is the first episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their d...

Devika Shankar, "An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India, 1860-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

12 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ecological and political instability have time and again emerged as catalysts for risky development projects along India's south-west coastline. In ...

Laura Hobson Faure, "Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust" (Yale UP, 2025)

12 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The first account of Jewish children’s flight from Nazi Germany to France—and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime At the eve...

Aidan Forth, "Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

11 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The concentration of terrorists, political suspects, ethnic minorities, prisoners of war, enemy aliens, and other potentially “dangerous” populati...

Brandon Bloch, "Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy" (Harvard UP, 2025)

11 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Germany’s Protestant churches, longtime strongholds of nationalism and militarism, largely backed the Nazi dictatorship that took power in 1933. For...

Dorothy Armstrong, "Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)

10 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power....

Averill Earls, "Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972" (Temple UP, 2025)

10 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Averill Earls is an associate professor in history at St. Olaf’s College and her research focuses on sexuality and modern Ireland. Her writing has a...

Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus

09 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus, by Betsy Golden Kellem, reveals the hidden history of early female circus perfo...

Maria R. Montalvo, "Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

09 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Explores the relationship between the production of enslaved property and the production of the past in the antebellum United States. It is extraordi...

William Kelleher Storey, "The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes" (Oxford UP, 2025)

08 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Cecil John Rhodes became one of the most influential people in the history of the British Empire. He made a fortune in South Africa by leading the wor...

Brendan A. Shanahan, "Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865-1965" (Oxford UP, 2025)

08 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late n...

Cynthia Paces, "Prague: The Heart of Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

08 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Prague: The Heart of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025) traces Prague's origins in the ninth century through the end of the Cold War. Highlights...

Chris Millington, "A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

07 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

FASCISM...FRANCE. Two words/ideas that scholars have spent much time and energy debating in relationship to one another. Chris Millington's A Histor...

Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, "Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise" (Yale UP, 2022)

06 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Christopher Marquis & Dr. Kunyuan Qiao presents a tho...

Ofer Ashkenazi and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, "Rethinking Jewish History and Memory Through Photography" (SUNY Press, 2025)

06 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ofer Ashkenazi is a Professor of History and the director of the Richard Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusal...

Molly Worthen, "Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump" (Random House, 2025)

06 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of...

Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, "Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

05 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Claire McCardell forever changed fashion—and most importantly, the lives of women. She shattered cultural norms around women’s clothes, and today ...

Steve Luxenberg, "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation" (Norton, 2019)

05 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices i...

Matthew Bowser, "Containing Decolonization: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma" (Manchester UP, 2025)

04 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Containing Decolonization: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma (Manchester University Press, 2025), historian Mat...

Brendan Simms, "Hitler: A Global Biography" (Basic Books, 2019)

04 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immens...

Nicholas Birman Trickett, "Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia" (Hurst, 2025)

03 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia (Hurst, 2025) traces how Russian economic policy precipitated the country’s slide towards a...

Oswyn Murray, "The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present" (Harvard UP, 2024)

03 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The study of ancient Greece has been central to Western conceptions of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks ...

David Woodman, "The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom" (Princeton UP, 2025)

02 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Professor David Woodman is a foundational biog...

Rhys Kaminski-Jones, "Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain, 1707-1819: True Britons and Celtic Empires" (Boydell & Brewer, 2025)

01 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the long eighteenth century, as Britain grappled with the aftermath of the 1707 Acts of Union and consolidated a global empire, Welsh ‘Cambro-Bri...

Raphael Cormack, "Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult" (Norton, 2025)

01 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

An international history of the uncanny in the 1920s and 1930s. The interwar period was a golden age for the occult. Spiritualists, clairvoyants, fak...

Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

31 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Foreca...

Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

31 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book ...

Laura Murphy, "Freedomville: The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt" (Columbia Global Reports, 2021)

30 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it? Millions of people around the world today are ens...

Prudence Peiffer, "The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever" (Harper, 2023)

30 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became th...

Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

29 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For generations of Americans, the purse has been an essential and highly adaptable object, used to achieve a host of social, cultural, and political o...