New Books in Western European Studies
Episodes
Miranda Spieler, “Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana” (Harvard University Press, 2012)
28 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), historian Miranda Spieler tells of the transformation of a slav...
Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jackson, eds. “The Thinking Space” (Ashgate, 2013)
27 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Believe it or not, the origins of this podcast and the entire New Books Network can be traced to a conversation I had in a cafein Ann Arbor, Michigan ...
Matthew C. Hunter, “Wicked Intelligence” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
23 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (a...
Colette Colligan, “A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris 1890-1960” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014)
10 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Paris was a center for the publication of numerous English-language books,...
Timothy Shenk, “Maurice Dobb: Political Economist” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013)
22 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb is now largely forgotten. That’s too bad for a number of reasons. He was a brilliant thinker who wrote so...
Deborah Cohen, “Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain” (Oxford UP, 2013)
14 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In her previous book, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (Yale University Press, 2006), Deborah Cohen took us into the homes of Britons...
Nitzan Lebovic, “The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics” (Palgrave, 2013)
14 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas Mann referred to Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) as a “criminal philosopher,” a “Pan-Germanist,” “an irrationalist,” a “Tarzan philosop...
H. Glenn Penny, “Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800” (UNC Press, 2013)
04 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
If you have spent a bit of time in Germany or with German friends, you may have noticed the deep interest and affinity many Germans have for American ...
David N. Livingstone, “Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)
30 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
A report to the General Assembly of Scottish Presbyterians of 1923 contains the following passage: “God placed the people of this world in families,...
Kathleen Wellman, “Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France” (Yale UP, 2013)
21 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Queens and royal mistresses of the Renaissance were the Hollywood celebrities of their time, which explains their enduring magnetism for writers, arti...
Robert J. Richards, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
21 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biol...
Michael Walker, “What You Want is in the Limo” (Spiegel and Grau, 2013)
13 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Conventional wisdom holds that the birth of the rock star came in 1956 with the ascendance of Elvis Presley. Not so, says author Michael Walker, who a...
Neil McKenna, “Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England” (Faber & Faber, 2013)
10 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
There is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be. It’s a statement that seems obvious enough and yet one which is still, to some degre...
Sandrine Sanos, “The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France” (Stanford University Press, 2013)
05 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013...
Yuval Levin, “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left” (Basic Books, 2013)
04 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
If you went to college in the United States and took a Western Civ class, you’ve probably read at least a bit of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the...
Jeffrey Church, “Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche” (Penn State Press, 2012)
30 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Jeffrey Church is the author of Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche (Penn State...
Jennifer Sessions, “By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria” (Cornell UP, 2011)
21 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whos...
Vincent Geoghegan, “Socialism and Religion: Roads to Common Wealth” (Routledge, 2011)
12 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
“Christianity and socialism go together like fire and water,” remarked August Bebel, Germany’s leading socialist, in 1874. The anticlerical viol...
Todd H. Weir, “Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview” (Palgrave, 2012)
25 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
I always learn something when I interview authors, but in this chat with Todd H. Weir I learned something startling: I’m a monist. What is more, yo...
John Roth and Peter Hayes, “The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies” (Oxford UP, 2010)
20 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve talked before on the show about how hard it is to enter into the field of Holocaust Studies. Just six weeks ago, for instance, I talked with D...
Karrin Hanshew, “Terror and Democracy in West Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
16 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
In West Germany in September and October of 1977, a group of self-described urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction (RAF) kidnapped industrialist Han...
Lindsay Krasnoff, “The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010” (Lexington Books, 2012)
14 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
In 1967, an official of the French basketball federation lamented the team’s poor finish at that year’s European Championships in Finland. The Fre...
Arnie Bernstein, “Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund” (St. Martin’s Press, 2013)
31 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Occasionally you hear shrill news reports about American Nazis. Judging by the pictures of them, they are almost always skin-headed morons who can’t...
Eric Jennings, “Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina” (University of California Press, 2011)
29 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine ai...
Benedetta Berti, “Armed Political Organizations: From Conflict to Integration” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)
28 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Benedetta Berti is the author of Armed Political Organizations: from Conflict to Integration (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Berti is a resear...
Jeff Bowersox, “Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914” (Oxford UP, 2013)
23 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Germany embarked on the age of imperialism a bit later than other global powers, and the German experience of empire was much shorter-lived than that ...
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “The Devil That Never Dies” (Little, Brown and Co., 2013)
22 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
There are 13 million Jews in the world today. There are also 13 million Senegalese, 13 million Zambians, 13 million Zimbabweans, and 13 million Chadia...
Simon P. Newman, “A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
10 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Ask most educated people about the development of American slavery, and you’re likely to hear something about Virginia or, just maybe, South Carolin...
Sanja Perovic, "The Calendar in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2012)
03 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Brumaire. Germinal. Thermidor. There is nothing more evocative of the French Revolutionary imaginary than the names of the months of the republican ca...
Dick Hobbs, “Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK” (Oxford UP, 2013)
20 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
There is a fascinating area of study of how communities around the world realized there was such a concept as organized crime. This topic is driven by...
John K. Thornton, “A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820” (Cambridge UP, 2012).
12 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most e...
Guido Steinberg, “German Jihad: On the Internationalisation of Islamist Terrorism” (Columbia UP, 2013)
10 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
I have read quite a few books on terrorism but always from an English language perspective. This has meant that I was missing the alternative stories ...
Scott Sowerby, “Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution” (Harvard UP, 2013)
23 Aug 2013
Contributed by Lukas
We all know that the “victors” generally write history. The “losers,” then, often get a bum rap. Such was the case with King James II. He’s ...
Michael D. Bailey, “Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe” (Cornell University Press, 2013)
05 Aug 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Superstitions flourish in our world–think of the elaborate rituals of baseball players, or knocking wood to avoid tempting fate, or that bit of happ...
Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite, “Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France” (LSU Press, 2013)
31 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random fac...
Robert Gerwarth, “Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich” (Yale UP, 2012)
24 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Few history books sell better than biographies of Nazi leaders. They attract anyone even tangentially interested in World War Two or Nazi Germany. ...
Alisha Rankin, “Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany” (U. Chicago Press, 2013)
18 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife...
Martha C. Howell, “Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600” (Cambridge UP, 2010)
17 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
When I was an undergraduate, I was taught that merchants in early modern Western Europe were “proto-capitalists.” I was never quite sure what that...
Brian Sandberg, “Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
15 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Sandberg‘s Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) significantly revi...
Anne-Marie O’Connor, “The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” (Knopf, 2012)
12 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Reporter Anne-Marie O’Connor uses the iconic gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to engage us in the exciting cultural life of fin-de-siecle Vienna, ...
Peter Hansen, “The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment” (Harvard University Press, 2013)
09 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Scholars have pointed to various historical ingredients they see as necessary for the development of modern sport: political changes that allowed peop...
Daniel Kilbride, “Being American in Europe: 1750-1860” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013)
28 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
When Americans go overseas, they know just who they are–Americans. But what was it like for a citizen of the United States to go abroad before there...
Luuk van Middelaar, “The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union” (Yale UP, 2013)
28 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
At the end of the 20th century, it looked like history was being made. After a century that had seen Europe dissolve into an orgy of bloody conflict n...
Gretchen Soderlund, “Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
27 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 2013), the new book from the University of Ore...
Elizabeth Foster, “Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940” (Stanford University Press, 2013)
26 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book,...
Samir Chopra, “Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket” (HarperCollins, 2012)
17 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains. For th...
Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
07 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasanna...
Mary Louise Roberts, “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
24 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate...
Paul Mojzes, “Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011)
22 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
I was a graduate student in the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved into violence. Beginning a dissertation on Habsburg history, I probably knew more abou...
John E. Joseph, “Saussure” (Oxford UP, 2012)
20 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamen...
Steven Hill, “Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age” (University of California Press, 2010)
09 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
What can the United States learn from Europe? One good answer, says Steven Hill, is social capitalism, a form of economic management that is responsiv...
Alexandra Hui, “The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910” (MIT Press, 2013)
30 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
In The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that...
John Dickie, “Mafia Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Italian Mafias” (Septre, 2012)
09 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
John Dickie is an historian of Italian organized crime who has a fairly unique perspective as he writes in English but is able to read the Italian sou...
Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
01 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Nicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of...
Lisa Chaney, “Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life”
01 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are avail...
Simon Martin, “Sport Italia: The Italian Love Affair with Sport” (I.B. Tauris, 2011)
29 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Azzurri, cyclists, boxers, Berlusconi, Balotelli, strapping Fascist men preparing to bear arms, strapping Fascist women preparing to bear children, th...
Sean Cocco, “Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
28 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco‘s...
Lawrence M. Principe, “The Secrets of Alchemy” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
18 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish? Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book exp...
Stanley Payne, “The Spanish Civil War” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
13 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The Spanish Civil War is one of those events that I have always felt I should know more about. Thanks to Stanley Payne‘s concise, lucid new work on ...
Joy Wiltenburg, “Crime & Culture in Early Modern Germany” (University of Virginia Press, 2012)
11 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Many people complain about sensationalism in the press. If a man slaughters his entire family, a jilted lover kills her erstwhile boyfriend, or a high...
Bernard Kelly, “Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen and the Second World War” (Merrion, 2012)
21 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The Republic of Ireland (aka The Irish Free State, Eire) declared neutrality during the Second World War. That wasn’t particularly unusual: Portugal...
E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
18 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge...
R. M. Douglas, “Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War” (Yale UP, 2012)
14 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
I imagine everyone who listens to this podcast knows about the Nazi effort to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling and murdering massive num...
Donald Bloxham, “The Final Solution: A Genocide” (Oxford UP, 2009)
12 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The end of the Cold War dramatically changed research into the Holocaust. The gradual opening up of archives across Eastern Europe allowed a flood of ...
Mary Fulbrook, “A Small Near Town Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2012)
19 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well stud...
Janice Neri, “The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
13 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Before the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts. Over the course of the sixteenth and seve...
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia” (Harvard University Press, 2012)
05 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Sanjay Subrahmanyam‘s new book explores translations across texts, images, and cultural practices in the early modern world. Courtly Encounters: Tra...
Brett Bebber, “Violence and Racism in Football: Politics and Cultural Conflict in British Society, 1968-1998” (Pickering & Chatto, 2011)
29 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
This past September an independent panel commissioned in 2009 by the British government released its 395-page report on the Hillsborough Stadium disas...
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, “The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After” (Columbia UP, 2005)
08 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
On July 10, 1941, Poles in the town of Jedwabne together with some number of German functionaries herded nearly 500 Jews into a barn and burnt them al...
Pamela O. Long, “Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600” (Oregon State University Press, 2011)
26 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Pamela O. Long‘s clear, accessible, and elegantly written recent book explores the ways that artisan/practitioners influenced the development of the...
Astrid Eckert, “The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
23 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
At the end of World War II, the Western Allies seized pretty much every official German document they could find and moved the lot out of Germany and ...
Jennifer Hall-Witt, “Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880” (University of New Hampshire Press, 2007)
16 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When I was young I liked to go to bars, especially bars where bands were playing. But when I got there, I often didn’t listen very carefully. And in...
Minsoo Kang, “Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination” (Harvard UP, 2011)
04 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
From artificial talking heads to the famed defecating duck and beyond, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (H...
Ben Shepherd, “Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare” (Harvard UP, 2012)
26 Sep 2012
Contributed by Lukas
With Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare (Harvard University Press, 2012), Ben Shepherd, a Reader at Glasgow Caledonian Universi...
Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
19 Sep 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take ...
Guy Fraser-Sampson, “Cricket at the Crossroads: Class, Colour and Controversy from 1967 to 1977” (Elliott & Thompson, 2011)
08 Sep 2012
Contributed by Lukas
During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England. Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appear...
Robert Bucholz and Joseph Ward, “London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
17 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Not long ago I had a discussion (prompted, I think, by a poll in The Economist) with my colleague about which city on earth could boast that it was th...
Anne Sebba, “That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor” (St. Martin’s Press, 2012)
17 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The story of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor is more often than not presented as a great love story: she is the woman for whom the King gave up...
Paul Friedland, “Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment In France” (Oxford University Press, 2012)
16 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–p...
Richard Bessel, “Germany 1945: From War to Peace” (Harper, 2009)
02 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just...
Elizabeth Goldsmith, “The King’s Mistresses” (PublicAffairs, 2012)
29 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
As Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Maz...
Nancy Hargrove, “T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year” (University of Florida Press, 2010)
15 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especia...
Sally Bedell Smith, “Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch” (Random House, 2012)
01 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media att...
Jim Endersby, “Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
23 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
I love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In add...
The NBS Spring Seminar: Understanding European Football
15 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
It’s springtime in the American Midwest. The playoffs for the NBA title and hockey’s Stanley Cup are moving into the later rounds, and the new bas...
Philip Gounev, “Corruption and Organized Crime in Europe” (Taylor and Francis, 2012)
10 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Today we are talking with Philip Gounev (co-edited with Vincenzo Ruggiero) about his new book Corruption and Organized Crime in Europe (Taylor and Fra...
Monica Black, “Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
27 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Over 2.5 million Germans died as a result of World War I, or about 4% of the German population at the time. Somewhere between 7 and 9 million Germans ...
Randy Roberts, “A Team for America: The Army-Navy Game That Rallied a Nation” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)
13 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Two weeks from now the National Football League will hold its annual draft of college football players. For the league’s teams, the draft is the cha...
Carolina Armenteros, “The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854” (Cornell UP, 2011)
06 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came...
Philip Oltermann, “Keeping Up With the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters” (Faber and Faber, 2012)
02 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Few people are in a better position to assess different countries and cultures than those caught between them. So it is with Philip Oltermann: a Germa...
Richard Wilson, “Inside the Divide: One City, Two Teams, the Old Firm” (Canongate, 2012)
22 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Alabama-Auburn. Maple Leafs-Canadiens. Boca Juniors-River Plate. Carlton-Collingwood.Fenerbahce-Galatasaray. Great rivalries are the catalysts of na...
David Edgerton, “Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War” (Oxford UP, 2011)
22 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
My grandfather joined up when the Second World War broke out, but he was soon returned to civvy street as he was much more valuable employing his mech...
Jorg Muth, “Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940” (UNT Press, 2011)
12 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
This week we’re continuing our focus on the Second World War, as our guest author, Jorg Muth, chats about his recent book Command Culture: Officer E...
Carolyn Burke, “No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf” (Knopf, 2011)
01 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a v...
Robert Holland, “Blue Water Empire: the British in the Mediterranean since 1800” (Penguin, 2012)
21 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
I have always found something distinctly ‘un-British’ about the Mediterranean. I grew up thinking of the British empire – and British spirit –...
David Stahel, “Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East” (Cambridge UP, 2009)
13 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
This week’s podcast is an interview with David Stahel. I will be talking to him about his 2009 work, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in ...
Andy Neill, “Had Me a Real Good Time: Faces Before, During, and After” (Omnibus, 2011)
09 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
In Had Me a Real Good Time: Faces Before, During, and After (Omnibus 2011) Andy Neill provides a detailed account of Faces, one of the most popular an...
Andrew Ritchie, “Quest for Speed: A History of Early Bicycle Racing 1868-1903” (Cycle Publishing, 2011)
30 Jan 2012
Contributed by Lukas
As several guests on this podcast have told us, sports have been fundamentally connected with the major developments of modern history: urbanization, ...
Simon Winder, “Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)
24 Jan 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When I was fourteen I was faced with a difficult choice. I was dreadful at languages but knew that I had another two years of brain-aching pain ahead ...
Gerald Steinacher, “Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice” (Oxford UP, 2011)
13 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not g...