New Books in History

Georgia Finnegan, "Grace & Grit: A History of Ballet in Minnesota" (Afton Historical Society, 2024)

06 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The names are iconic and familiar to anyone in Minnesota with an interest in dance: the Andaházy School of Classical Ballet, Minnesota Dance Theatre,...

Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero, "Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization" (U California Press, 2024)

06 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Maria Kaika & Dr. Luca Ruggiero reveals...

Janam Mukherjee, "Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2015)

06 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The years leading up to the independence and accompanying partition of India mark a tumultuous period in the history of Bengal. Representing both a ma...

Elizabeth T. Craft, "Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage" (Oxford UP, 2024)

05 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

George M. Cohan was one of those rare Broadway figures who was a composer, lyricist, playwright, performer, director, theater owner, and star actor. H...

Arwen P. Mohun, "American Imperialist: Cruelty and Consequence in the Scramble for Africa" (Chicago UP, 2023)

05 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This biography of “African explorer” Richard Dorsey Mohun, written by one of his descendants, reveals how American greed and state power helped sh...

Stefan Cristian Ionescu, "Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

05 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On 23rd August 1944, following the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania changed sides and abandoned the Axis to join the Al...

John Coakley ed et al., "The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World: Maritime Predation, Empire, and the Construction of Authority at Sea" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

04 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the early modern period, both legal and illegal maritime predation was a common occurrence, but the expansion of European maritime empires exacerba...

Robert C. Austin, "Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania's First and Last King" (Central European UP, 2024)

04 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Listen to this engaging podcast with historian Robert Austin, the author of Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania's First and Last King (Central Europea...

Michael Visontay, "Noble Fragments: The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke Up a Gutenberg Bible" (Scribe, 2024)

04 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

One hundred years ago, Gabriel Wells, a New York bookseller, committed a crime against history. He broke up the world’s greatest book, the Gutenberg...

Kyle Orland, "Minesweeper" (Boss Fight Books, 2023)

04 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If you had some free time and a Windows PC in the 1990s, your mouse probably crawled its way to Minesweeper, an exciting watch-where-you-click puzzle ...

Isabel Moreira, "Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint" (Oxford UP, 2024)

03 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This book tells the remarkable life of Balthild of Francia (c. 633-80), a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon slave who became a queen of France. Described in...

Robert Houghton, "The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

03 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Games with a medieval setting are commercially lucrative and reach a truly massive audience. Moreover, they can engage their players in a manner that ...

László Borhi, "Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes" (Central European UP, 2024)

03 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of Ea...

Christos Lynteris, "Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography" (MIT Press, 2022)

02 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the “pa...

Hallie Franks, "Ancient Sculpture and Twentieth-Century American Womanhood: Venus Envy" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

02 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ancient Sculpture and Twentieth-Century American Womanhood: Venus Envy (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Hallie Franks examines the reception of Graeco-Roman...

David N. Livingstone, "The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2024)

02 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Scientists, journalists, and politicians increasingly tell us that human impacts on climate constitute the single greatest threat facing our planet an...

Caroline Dunn, "Ladies-in-waiting in Medieval England" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

02 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Caroline Dunn joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Ladies-in-Waiting in Medieval England (Cambridge UP, 2025), which examines female attend...

Ellen Fenzel Arnold, "Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, C. 300-1100" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jana Byars talks to Ellen Arnold about Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, 300 - 1100 (Cambridge UP, 2024). Fishermen...

Timothy P. R. Weaver, "Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City" (Temple UP, 2025)

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Looking closely at New York City's political development since the 1970s, three "political orders"--conservativism, neoliberalism, and egalitarianism-...

Dawn Day Biehler, "Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History" (U Washington Press, 2024)

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central Park has long been home to an abund...

Ian G. Baird, "Champassak Royalty and Sovereignty: Within and Between Nation-States in Mainland Southeast Asia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2024)

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Before the creation of the European colonial states in the nineteenth century, Southeast Asia had hundreds of royal families, large and small. Today, ...

Sam Srauy, "Race, Culture and the Video Game Industry: A Vicious Circuit" (Routledge, 2024)

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

My guest today Sam Srauy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University, Her res...

Aliyah Khan on the Muslim Caribbean

28 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Saeed Khan and Chella Ward sat down with Dr Aliyah Khan to discuss Muslimness in the Caribbean, drawing on Aliyah’s book Far From ...

Matthew Hughes, "Britain's Pacification of Palestine" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

28 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this complete military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine, Britain's Pacification of Palestine (Cambridge UP, 2019...

Mike Sielski, "Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)

26 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The evolution of basketball, and much of the social and cultural change in America, can be traced through one powerful act on the court: the slam dunk...

Doina Anca Cretu, "Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania" (Stanford UP, 2025)

26 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The decades following World War I were a period of political, social, and economic transformation for Central and Eastern Europe. Foreign Aid and Sta...

Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Büssow, "Late Ottoman Gaza: An Eastern Mediterranean Hub in Transformation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

26 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today, when we think about Gaza we think about the war, the destruction of the city and the constant movement of its population. In contemporary publi...

Gemma Hollman, "Women in the Middle Ages: Illuminating the World of Peasants, Nuns, and Queens" (Abbeville Press, 2024)

26 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Medieval women ruled over kingdoms, abbeys, and households; produced stunning works of art and craft; and did the hard work that kept ordinary familie...

David R. Saunders, "Chasing Archipelagic Dreams: The Expansion of Foreign Influence in Sabah amid the End of Empire, 1945–1965" (Cornell UP, 2024)

25 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Chasing Archipelagic Dreams: The Expansion of Foreign Influence in Sabah amid the End of Empire, 1945–1965 (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr...

Jenny Shaw, "The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery" (UNC Press, 2024)

23 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery (UNC Press, 2024) is a dramatic transatlantic story about five women who birthe...

Benjamin Heber Johnson, "Texas: An American History" (Yale UP, 2025)

23 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There's more to Texas than hats, oil, and BBQ, writes Benjamin Johnson in his sweeping new synthesis, Texas: An American History (Yale UP: 2025) - ...

Thanasis S. Fotiou, "Hitler’s Hunting Squad in Southern Europe: The Bloody Path of Fritz Schubert through Occupied Crete and Macedonia" (Pen and Sword, 2024)

23 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Hitler’s Hunting Squad in Southern Europe: The Bloody Path of Fritz Schubert through Occupied Crete and Macedonia (Pen and Sword, 2024) traces the ...

Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison, "Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order" (Cambria Press, 2024)

23 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Popular English-language discourse about Taiwan often contains tropes like how “Taiwan is the real China” or how Taiwan “split with China in 194...

Megan Moran, "Gender and Family Networks in Early Modern Italy" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

23 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Women from the Ricasoli and Spinelli families formed a wide variety of social networks within and beyond Florence through their letters as they negoti...

Rhiannon Stephens, "Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History" (Duke UP, 2022)

22 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke UP, 2022), Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in ea...

Ilan Stavans, "Latino USA: A Cartoon History" (Basic Books, 2024)

22 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This interview includes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Professor of Humanities, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M); Annette Martínez-Iñesta, Inst...

Shay A. Pilnik, "The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War" (Purdue UP, 2025)

22 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, makin...

Andrew Jotischky, "The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History" (Yale UP, 2024)

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the late Roman Empire onwards, monasteries and convents were a common sight throughout Europe. But who were monasteries for? What kind of people ...

Adnan Husain on Reorienting History

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Adnan Husain about some of the challenges involved in reorienting history. We spoke about the...

Noa Shashar, "The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648-1850" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

 In The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648 - 1850 (Brandeis UP, 2024), Noa Shashar sheds light on Jewish family life in the early m...

Martyn Percy, "The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England" (Hurst, 2025)

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England (Hurst, 2025) by Dr. Martyn Percy offers a bold and unsettlin...

Susan Tate Ankeny, "American Flygirl" (Citadel Press, 2024)

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1931, Hazel Ying Lee, a nineteen-year-old American daughter of Chinese immigrants, sat in on a friend’s flight lesson. It changed her life. In le...

Mario Cams and Elke Papelitzky, "Remapping the World in East Asia: Toward a Global History of the 'Ricci Maps'" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When we think of the sixteenth-century arrival of European missionaries in East Asia, there is a tendency to imagine this meeting as a civilizational ...

Tahir Kamran, "Chequered Past, Uncertain Future: The History of Pakistan" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Pakistan’s history since independence is…complicated. Partition wrecked the economy, leaving all the economic infrastructure in India. Democracy w...

The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Our book is: The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024) by Dr. Amy Reading, which is a lively and intimate bi...

Xian Wang, "Gendered Memories: An Imaginary Museum for Ding Ling and Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyrs" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gendered Memories: An Imaginary Museum for Ding Ling and Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyrs (U Michigan Press, 2025) takes readers on a journey th...

Nicole Lobdell, "X-Ray" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a transparent w...

Asheesh Kapur Siddique, "The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World" (Yale UP, 2024)

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two ocea...

Emine Ö Evered, "Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity" (U Texas Press, 2024)

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the histo...

Lori A. Flores, "Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19" (UNC Press, 2025)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with...

Adam R. Nelson, "Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America (U Chicago Press, 2023) launches a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history ...

Yoni Appelbaum, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity" (Random House, 2025)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are inaccessible to all but the very wealthy. But, in America, t...

Kathryn Taylor, "Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice" (U Delaware Press, 2023)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice (University of Delaware Press, 2023) explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make ...

Mary Frances Phillips, "Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins" (NYU Press, 2025)

17 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered Black Panther Party membe...

Adelina Stefan, "Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco's Spain" (Cornell UP, 2024)

17 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco's Spain (Cornell UP, 2024) examines the political effects of inte...

The Soundworld of Harriet Tubman

17 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Just in time for Black History Month, we share an episode we’ve been excitedly working on for a number of months now. Ethnomusicologist Maya Cunning...

Shane Bobrycki, "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages" (Princeton UP, 2024)

17 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as S...

Erik Freas, "Palestine's Christians and the Nationalist Cause: The Late Ottoman and Mandatory Periods" (Routledge, 2024)

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Palestine's Christians and the Nationalist Cause: The Late Ottoman and Mandatory Periods (Routledge, 2024) provides an historical overview of Palesti...

Raphael Chijioke Njoku, "Queen Elizabeth II and the Africans: Narrating Decolonization, Postwar Commonwealth, and Africa’s Development, 1947-2022" (Leuven UP, 2024)

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The road to Queen Elizabeth II’s implementation of African reforms was rough, especially in the first two decades following her ascension to the thr...

Hunter Price, "Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty" (U Virginia Press, 2024)

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the early years of American independence, Methodism emerged as the new republic’s fastest growing religious movement and its largest voluntary as...

Marcel Elias, "English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291-1453" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The period from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) witnessed the production of a substantial corpus o...

Jacqueline M. Burek, "Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century" (York Medieval Press, 2023)

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore,...

Jessica A. Brockmole, "Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way Into the Driver's Seat" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since the commercial introduction of the automobile, US automakers have always sought women as customers and advertised accordingly. How, then, did ca...

Miles Glendinning, "Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History (Bloomsbury, 2021) is a major work that provides the first comprehensive histo...

Xiangli Ding, "Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to...

Glen L. Thompson, "Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China" (Eerdmans, 2024)

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Many people assume that the first introduction of Christianity to the Chinese was part of nineteenth-century Western imperialism. In fact, Syriac-spea...

Adam Pennington, "Henry VIII and the Plantagenet Poles: The Rise and Fall of a Dynasty" (Pen and Sword History, 2024)

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The story of King Henry VIII, a man who married six times only to execute two of those wives, is part of Great Britain’s national and international ...

Erika Graham-Goering et al., "Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

14 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jana Byars talks to Erika Graham-Goering of the University of Oslo about Lordship and the Decentralized State in Late Medieval Europe (Oxford Univer...

Peter Burke, "Ignorance: A Global History" (Yale UP, 2024)

14 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Throughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the Middle Ages as an era of dar...

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, "Mission Bengal: A Saffron Experiment" (HarperCollins India, 2020)

14 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From being a fringe political party in 2013 to sweeping nearly half of the state s forty-two Lok Sabha seats in 2019, the BJP has gained ground in Wes...

Pamela Allen Brown, "The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage: Agency, Theatricality, and the Innamorata" (Oxford UP, 2021)

14 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Pamela Allen Brown joins Jana Byars to talk about The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford University Press, 2022), which traces the trans...

Saulius Suziedelis, "Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)

14 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania is the first scholarly English-language study of Lithuania during World War II which utilizes previously ...

Ada Palmer, "Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

13 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ada Palmer joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Inventing the Renaissance (U Chicago Press, 2025) and the ways history is written and used....

Randall Fuller, "Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

13 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society "to answer the great questions" of special importance to women: "What...

Bertil Lintner, "The Golden Land Ablaze: Coups, Insurgents and the State in Myanmar" (Oxford UP, 2024)

13 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Four years ago, on Feb. 1 2021, the Burmese military overthrew the fledgling democratic government in the Southeast Asian country of Burma, officially...

The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn

13 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Our book is: The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) by award-winning historian ...

Patricia Owens, "Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men" (Princeton UP, 2025)

13 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role ...

Philip Howell, "Pub" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object L...

Frank Gerits, "The Ideological Scramble for Africa: How the Pursuit of Anticolonial Modernity Shaped a Postcolonial Order, 1945-1966" (Cornell UP, 2023)

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In The Ideological Scramble for Africa, Frank Gerits examines how African leaders in the 1950s and 1960s crafted an anticolonial modernization projec...

William Sweet, "Before and After Democracy: Philosophy, Religion, and Politics" (Peeters, 2023)

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Recognized for his work on philosophy, religion and politics, Dr. Sweet talks at length about Before and After Democracy: Philosophy, Religion, and P...

Adam Laats, "Mr. Lancaster's System: The Failed Reform That Created America's Public Schools" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

11 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Two centuries ago, London school reformer Joseph Lancaster swept into New York City to revolutionize its public schools. Pennsylvania and Massachusett...

Rebecca Davis Gibbons, "The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime" (Cornell UP, 2022)

11 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system ...

Tao Leigh Goffe, "Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis" (Doubleday Books, 2025)

10 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of...

Magdalena Buchczyk, "Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, History and Ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

10 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, history and ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Magdalena...

Edward Simon, "The Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues: A Visual History" (Cernunnos, 2024)

10 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A companion piece to Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, Seven Sins and Seven Virtues (Abram...

Divya Kannan, "Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

10 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces a complex history of caste, race, education, and Christian m...

Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle

10 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Andrea Chandler to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Canada and Eastern Europe,...

Peter J. Bowler, "Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

09 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention ...

Michael Rembis, "Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum" (Oxford UP, 2025)

09 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few...

Bruce Robbins, "Atrocity: A Literary History" (Stanford UP, 2025)

09 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not always seen as violating a moral norm or inviting indignation. Could the con...

Katie Beisel Hollenbach, "The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom" (Oxford UP, 2024)

09 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsi...

Our History with AI is (much) Longer than You Think (with Kevin LaGrandeur)

08 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It’s the UConn Popcast, and when did we really start dreaming about the promise, and the danger, of artificial intelligence? When ChatGPT was relea...

Jeff Gomez, "There Was No Alternative: Generation X, AIDS, and the Making of a Classic Nineties Record" (McFarland, 2023)

08 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Grunge. Flannel. Generation X. In 1993, Seattle was the capital of the world, Nirvana was king, and slackers were everywhere. When the Red Hot organiz...

Martin D. Brown et al., "The Bondian Cold War: The Transnational Legacy of a Cultural Icon" (Routledge, 2024)

08 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

James Bond, Ian Fleming’s irrepressible and ubiquitous ‘spy,’ is often understood as a Cold Warrior, but James Bond’s Cold War diverged from t...

Eric Cline, "After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations" (Princeton UP, 2025)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At the end of Eric Cline's bestselling history 1177 B.C., many of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lay in rui...

William Gallois, "Qayrawan: The Amuletic City" (Penn State UP, 2024)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

William Gallois joins the podcast to discuss his latest book, Qayrawān: The Amuletic City, published by The Pennsylvania State University Press in 2...

Samantha Ege, "South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene by Samantha Ege (University of Illinois Press, 2014) is a collec...

Peter Whitewood, "The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military" (UP of Kansas, 2015)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, includin...

Rosemary Wakeman, "The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

06 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization–and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trade...

Jonathan Haslam, "Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine" (Harvard UP, 2025)

06 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should not have taken the world by surprise. The attack escalated a war that began in 2014 wi...