New Books in Western European Studies
Episodes
Elizabeth King and W. David Todd, "Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend" (Getty, 2023)
19 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object a...
Steven King, "Fraudulent Lives: Imagining Welfare Cheats from the Poor Law to the Present" (McGill Queen's UP, 2024)
19 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Western welfare state model is beset with structural, financial, and moral crises. So-called scroungers, cheats, and disability fakers persistentl...
Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
17 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. ...
Melissa B. Reynolds, "Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
17 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What do you do when you feel an itchy throat coming on? You probably head online, first to search for your symptoms and then to evaluate the informat...
Frank Trentmann, "Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022" (Knopf, 2024)
16 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 (Knopf, 2024) traces the moral concerns and clashes of a nation re-building, re-cons...
Emily Murdoch Perkins, "Regina: The Queens Who Could Have Been" (The History Press, 2024)
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What queens would England have had if firstborn daughters, not firstborn sons, had inherited the throne? In Regina: The Queens Who Could Have Been (...
Isaac Stanley-Becker, "Europe Without Borders: A History" (Princeton UP, 2025)
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Forty years ago, Schengen - a wine-making village at the tripoint border of Luxembourg, France, and Germany - made European history when diplomats fro...
Yehudah Cohn, trans., "Mine Is The Golden Tongue: The Hebrew Sonnets Of Immanuel Of Rome" (Centro Primo Levi, 2023)
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mine Is The Golden Tongue: The Hebrew Sonnets Of Immanuel Of Rome (Centro Primo Levi, 2023) contains the first known sonnets written in Hebrew. Their...
Nitzan Lebovic, "Homo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time" (Cornell UP, 2025)
13 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Homo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time (Cornell UP, 2025) tells the story of a group of twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals who grappled ...
Ciaran O'Neill, "Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland: Life in a Palliative State" (Oxford UP, 2024)
12 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ciaran O’Neill is the Ussher Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century History at Trinity College Dublin. His work mainly focuses on the social and ...
Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti, "Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views" (Oxford UP, 2024)
11 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How should broadly liberal democratic societies stop illiberal and antidemocratic views from gaining influence while honouring liberal democratic valu...
Dayne C. Riley, "Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751" (Bucknell UP, 2024)
09 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and to...
Caitlín Eilís Barrett, "Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens" (Oxford UP, 2019)
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian...
Adam Elliott-Cooper, "Black Resistance to British Policing" (Manchester UP, 2021)
07 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As police racism unsettles Britain's tolerant self-image, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester UP, 2021) details the activism that made ...
Peter Mandler, "The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2020)
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How did public demand shape education in the 20th century? In The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Secon...
Peter Mandler, "The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2020)
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How did public demand shape education in the 20th century? In The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Secon...
Emily Marker, "Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era" (Cornell UP, 2022)
05 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Thinking together the histories of European integration and African decolonization, Emily Marker's Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belo...
Adam Zucker, "Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity" (Oxford UP, 2024)
03 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity (Oxford UP, 2024) dances along the borderline of sense and nonsense in earl...
Stuart Elden, "The Early Foucault" (Polity Press, 2021)
03 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What were the key ideas and influences on Michel Foucault’s early career? In The Early Foucault (Polity Press, 2021), Stuart Elden, Professor of...
Nicholas R. Jones, "Cervantine Blackness" (Penn State UP, 2024)
30 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelli...
Sara Lodge, "The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective" (Yale UP, 2024)
29 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective (Yale UP, 2024), Sara Lodge tells stories of women who brought 19th century criminals to j...
Harvey J. Kaye, "The British Marxist Historians" (Zero Book, 2022)
29 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The British Marxist Historians, originally published in 1995, remains the first and most complete study of the founders of one of the most influentia...
Robert Darnton, "Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment" (Oxford UP, 2021)
29 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" — countries located along the French b...
Emily Herring, "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" (Basic Books, 2024)
29 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (Basic Books, 2024) is the first English-language biography of Henri B...
Peter Salmon, "An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida" (Verso, 2020)
28 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right,...
Kit Kowol, "Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2024)
28 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We think we know all there is to know about Britain's Second World War. We don't. This radical re-interpretation of British history and British Conser...
Ben Highmore, "Playgrounds: The Experimental Years" (Reaktion, 2024)
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After World War II, a new kind of playground emerged in Northern Europe and North America. Rather than slides, swings, and roundabouts, these new play...
John Eglin, "The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency" (Oxford UP, 2023)
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
John Eglin talks with Jana Byars about The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency (Oxford UP, 2023). Gambling ...
Giovanna Ceserani, "A World Made by Traval: A Digital Grand Tour" (Stanford UP, 2024)
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the eighteenth century, tens of thousands of travelers journeyed to Italy on the Grand Tour. These travels in the age of Enlightenment contributed ...
Rebecca Ball, "A Hundred English Working-Class Lives, 1900-1945" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)
26 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How do ordinary people write the stories of their lives? In A Hundred English Working-Class Lives, 1900-1945 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024), Rebecca Ba...
Amy Helen Bell, "Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London" (Yale UP, 2024)
22 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Fear was the unacknowledged spectre haunting the streets of London during the Second World War; fear not only of death from the German bombers circlin...
Theresa Flanigan, "The Ponte Vecchio: Architecture, Politics, and Civic Identity in Late Medieval Florence" (Brepols, 2024)
21 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Famous today for the shops lining its sloped street, the Ponte Vecchio is the last premodern bridge spanning the Arno River at Florence and one of the...
Christian Bailey, "German Jews in Love: A History" (Stanford UP, 2022)
20 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
German Jews in Love: A History (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the dynamic role of love in German-Jewish lives, from the birth of the German Empire in t...
Jan Machielsen, "The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
20 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In June 1609, two judges left Bordeaux for a territory at the very edge of their jurisdiction, a Basque-speaking province on the Atlantic coast called...
Richard Davenport-Hines, "History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft" (William Collins, 2024)
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Five hundred years ago, Thomas Wolsey endowed in Oxford a foundation he called Cardinal's College. Henry VIII, the monarch who dismissed and ruined hi...
Kenny Cupers, "The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design" (U Texas Press, 2024)
17 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Kenny Cupers traces the rise of plan...
Katya Motyl, "Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
14 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934 (University of Chicago Press, 2024) historian Dr. Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts...
David J. Collins, SJ, "Disenchanting Albert the Great: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician" (Penn State UP, 2024)
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David J Collins, SJ joins Jana Byars to talk about Disenchanting Albert the Great: the Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician (Penn State Press, ...
Lucy Noakes, "Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain" (Manchester UP, 2022)
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Death in war matters. It matters to the individual, threatened with their own death, or the death of loved ones. It matters to groups and communities ...
Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz, "Milton's Moving Bodies" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today, I am excited to talk to Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz about the new collection of essays they have edited. Milton’s Moving Bodies ...
Henri Colt, "Becoming Modigliani" (Rake Press, 2024)
09 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Becoming Modigliani (Rake Press, 2024) is a comprehensive biography that delves into the troubled life of the Jewish-Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani...
Richard J. Evans, "Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich" (Penguin, 2024)
08 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Ge...
Pascal Lottaz and Ingemar Ottosson, "Sweden, Japan, and the Long Second World War: 1931-1945" (Routledge, 2021)
08 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Lottaz and Ottosson explore the intricate relationship between neutral Sweden and Imperial Japan during the latter's 15 years of warfare in Asia and i...
Scott Anthony, "The Story of British Propaganda Film" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
07 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
'All art is propaganda,' wrote George Orwell, 'but not all propaganda is art.' Moving from World War I to the 'War on Terror' and beyond, The Story o...
Richard J. Golsan, "Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes Against Humanity" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The trial of former SS lieutenant and Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie was France's first trial for crimes against humanity. Known as the "Butcher of Lyon" ...
George Steinmetz, "The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024)
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It is only in recent years that sociologists and historians of the social sciences have given empire the attention it deserves in histories of the dis...
Shannon Gayk, "Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Shannon Gayk joins Jana Byars to discuss her new book. Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Medieval English Literature (University of C...
Geneviève Rousselière, "Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
04 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclu...
Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß, "Antisemitism in the North: History and State of Research" (de Gruyter, 2019)
04 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Is research on antisemitism even necessary in countries with a relatively small Jewish population? Absolutely, as Antisemitism in the North: History ...
Alex Mayhew, "Making Sense of the Great War: Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
04 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The First World War was an unprecedented crisis, with communities and societies enduring the unimaginable hardships of a prolonged conflict on an ind...
Cindy Ermus, "The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
03 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This episode features a conversation with Dr. Cindy Ermus on her recently published book, The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in t...
Steven King et al., "In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law, 1834–1900" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022)
02 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was ...
Adrian Tinniswood, "The Power and the Glory: Life in the English Country House Before the Great War" (Basic Books, 2024)
02 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyon...
Andrew Hui, "The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries" (Princeton UP, 2024)
01 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
With the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe's cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. An...
Micah Alpaugh, "The People's Revolution of 1789" (Cornell UP, 2024)
29 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Micah Alpaugh argues that the forgotten actors in the French Revolution are the French people themselves. Sure, are numerous ways in which we today re...
Daniel Cowling, "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans: The British Occupation of Germany, 1945-49" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
28 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Germany, spring 1945. Hitler is dead and his armies crushed. Across the conquered Reich, cities lie devastated by Allied saturation bombing; their tra...
Anne B. Rodrick, "Lecturing the Victorians: Knowledge-Based Culture and Participatory Citizenship" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
28 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“We are a much-lectured people,” wrote Robert Spence Watson in 1897. Beginning at mid-century, cities and towns across England used the popular le...
Denys Turner, "Dante the Theologian" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
27 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
An understanding of Dante the theologian as distinct from Dante the poet has been neglected in an appreciation of Dante's work as a whole. That is ...
Andrew Fleming, "The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda" (Birlinn, 2024)
24 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When the last 36 inhabitants of St Kilda, 40 miles west of the Scottish Hebrides, were evacuated in 1930, the archipelago at ‘the edge of the world’...
Fiona Smyth, "Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century" (Manchester UP, 2024)
22 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scient...
Leila K. Norako, "Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500" (Cornell UP, 2024)
22 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500 (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Leila Norako asks w...
Jill Norman, "The English Table: Our Food Through the Ages" (Reaktion, 2024)
22 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The English Table: Our Food through the Ages (Reaktion, 2024) by Jill Norman is a delectable journey through the culinary history of England, from a...
Roberta Pergher, "Mussolini's Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy's Borderlands, 1922–1943" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
22 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
With Mussolini's Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy's Borderlands, 1922–1943 (Cambridge UP, 2017), Roberta Pergher transforms our...
Owen Ware, "Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany" (Routledge, 2023)
20 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany by Owen Ware (Routledge, 2024) takes the reader on a tour through the reception of Yoga philosophies in ninetee...
Dennis Romano, "Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City" (Oxford UP, 2023)
20 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites o...
Ramie Targoff, "Shakespeare's Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance" (Knopf, 2024)
20 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Shakespeare's Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance (Knopf, 2024) by Dr. Ramie Targoff, discover the lives and work of four ambitious Ren...
George Severs, "Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
19 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Dr George Severs draws on activist campaign lite...
Tom Theuns, "Protecting Democracy in Europe: Pluralism, Autocracy and the Future of the EU" (Hurst, 2024)
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The European Union has a big problem—a potentially fatal one. How should it deal with a member state or states that reject democracy and the rule of...
Nicholas Baer, "Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism" (U California Press, 2024)
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Nicholas Baer reassesses Weimar cinema in...
Agustina Paglayan, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education" (Princeton UP, 2024)
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How the expansion of primary education in the West emerged not from democratic ideals but from the state's desire to control its citizens. Nearly ever...
Lucian Staiano-Daniels, "The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War (Cambridge UP, 2024), Lucian Staino-Daniles uses the...
Laure Astourian, "The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema" (Indiana UP, 2024)
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema (Indiana UP, 2024) traces the surprising ...
Alison Stone, "Women on Philosophy of Art: Britain 1770-1900" (Oxford UP, 2024)
12 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Women on Philosophy of Art: Britain 1770-1900 (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first study of women's philosophies of art in long nineteenth-century Britain....
Conor McCabe, "The Lost and Early Writings of James Connolly, 1889-1898" (Iskra Books, 2024)
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Conor McCabe is a research fellow with Queen’s Business School, Queens University Belfast. He is the author of numerous policy and research repo...
Islamophobia, France and Muslim Political Subjectivity
08 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview, recorded for Islamophobia Awareness Month, Hizer Mir and Chella Ward talk to Kawtar Najib and Rayan Freschi about Islamophobia in F...
Filippo Gianferrari, "Dante's Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Poetics" (Oxford UP, 2024)
06 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In fourteenth-century Italy, literacy became accessible to a significantly larger portion of the lay population (allegedly between 60 and 80 percent i...
Gareth Millward, "Sick Note: A History of the British Welfare State" (Oxford UP, 2022)
05 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sick Note: A History of the British Welfare State (Oxford UP, 2022) is a history of how the British state asked, 'who is really sick?' Tracing medica...
Graham Brady, "Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies, and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers" (Ithaka, 2024)
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies, and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers (Ithaka, 2024) by Sir Graham Brady provides an insider’s look at the power st...
Simeon Koole, "Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us...
Hannah Weaver, "Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past" (Cornell UP, 2024)
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Weaver examines the mediaeval pr...
Mark Stoyle, "A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549" (Yale UP, 2022)
03 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Western Rising of 1549 was the most catastrophic event to occur in Devon and Cornwall between the Black Death and the Civil War. Beginning as an a...
Brian Groom, "Made in Manchester: A People's History of the City That Shaped the Modern World" (Harpernorth, 2024)
02 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Long before Manchester gave the world titans of industry, comedy, music and sport, it was the cosmopolitan Roman fort of Mamucium. But it was as the ‘...
Georgia Henley, "Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales" (Oxford UP, 2024)
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, Reimagining ...
Alistaire Tallent, "Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France" (U Delaware Press, 2023)
31 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Alistaire Tallent joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France (University of D...
Margarette Lincoln, "Perfection: 400 Years of Women's Quest for Beauty" (Yale UP, 2024)
26 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A colourful account of women's health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today's viral trends. Victorian women ate arsenic to achie...
Deborah Valenze, "The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History" (Yale UP, 2023)
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and envi...
Seth Kimmel, "The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
23 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain (U Chicago Press, 2024) Seth Kimmel explores the material history of librari...
John Freed, “Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth” (Yale UP, 2016)
22 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For all of his importance as a medieval ruler, there are surprisingly few biographies in English of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa (c. 1122-1...
Beatrice de Graaf, "Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
22 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After twenty-six years of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and endless fighting, the victorious powers craved stability after Napoleon's defeat i...
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
21 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and c...
Sonja Stojanovic, "Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction in French" (Liverpool UP, 2023)
20 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visibl...
Amanda Shoaf Vincent, "Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City: Paris's New Parks, 1977-1995" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
18 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the space of about two decades, five major parks were proposed, designed, and created in Paris. Some emerged from competitions between professiona...
Anne Higonnet, "Liberty Equality Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution" (Norton, 2024)
18 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, ...
Thomas Weber, “Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi” (Basic Books, 2017)
18 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Few would dispute that Hitler’s ideas led to war and genocide. Less clear however, is how and when those ideas developed. In his latest book, Becomi...
Corey Ross, "Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World" (Princeton UP, 2024)
17 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These...
Jacques Bertrand, "Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar" (Cornell UP, 2022)
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (Southeast Asia Program Publications/Cornell UP, 2022) asks why the ...
Jamie Furlong and Will Jennings, "The Changing Electoral Map of England and Wales" (Oxford UP, 2024)
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What is the connection between where people live and how they vote? In The Changing Electoral Map of England and Wales (Oxford UP, 2024), Jamie Fur...
Meghana Joshi, "Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin" (Berghahn, 2024)
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin (Berghahn Books, 2024) by Dr. Meghana Joshi engages with how ...
Rochelle Gurstein, "Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art" (Yale UP, 2024)
13 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the...
Theo Williams, "Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation" (Verso, 2022)
13 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Theo Williams’ Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation (Verso, 2022) shows how bla...