New Books with Miranda Melcher

James Sears, "Queering Rehoboth Beach: Beyond the Boardwalk" (Temple UP, 2024)

09 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“Create A More Positive Rehoboth” was a decades-long goal for progress and inclusiveness in a charming beach town in southern Delaware. Rehoboth, ...

Sylvia D. Hoffert, "Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

08 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town (University of Georgia Press, 2025), Dr. Sylvia Hoffert...

José Blanco F. and Raúl J. Vázquez-López, "Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico: Taínos to Beauty Queens" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

07 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Analyzing dress, costume, and fashion in Puerto Rico, Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico: Taínos to Beauty Queens (Bloomsbury, 20...

Beau Cleland, "Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

07 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Beau Clel...

Éléna Choquette, "Land and the Liberal Project: Canada’s Violent Expansion" (UBC Press, 2024)

06 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1867, Canada was a small country flanking the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes, but within a few years its claims to sovereignty spanned the cont...

Melanie McDonagh, "Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century" (Yale UP, 2025)

06 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The twentieth century is understood as an era of growing, inexorable secularism, yet in Britain between the 1890s and the 1960s there was a marked tur...

Anna Zhelnina, "Private Life, Public Action: How Housing Politics Mobilized Citizens in Moscow" (Temple UP, 2025)

05 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Renovation, an urban renewal plan in Moscow that was announced in the spring of 2017, proposed to demolish thousands of socialist-era apartment buildi...

Adam Silverstein, "Haman" (Princeton UP, 2025)

05 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Haman, infamous as the antagonist in the book of Esther, appears as a villainous figure in virtually all varieties of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam...

Anny Gaul, "Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato" (U California Press, 2025)

04 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

By the end of the twentieth century, the tomato—indigenous to the Americas—had become Egypt's top horticultural crop and a staple of Egyptian cuis...

Elizabeth Chika Tippett, "The Master-Servant Doctrine: How Old Legal Rules Haunt the Modern Workplace" (U California Press, 2025)

03 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The field of employment law used to be called "master-servant law." Even if this term has fallen out of favor, a central truth has not changed: modern...

Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis, "Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics" (Oxford UP, 2025)

03 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Following the end of the Cold War, the world experienced a remarkable wave of democratization. Over the next two decades, numerous authoritarian regim...

Jonathan S. Jones, "Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis" (UNC Press, 2025)

02 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, t...

Julia Wagner, "Hester Street" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

02 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Joan Micklin Silver's groundbreaking debut feature film, Hester Street (1975), vividly portrays the immigrant experience through the eyes of Gitl (C...

Marc Sommers, "We the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone" (U Georgia Press, 2023)

30 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone (U Georgia Press, 2023) by Dr. Marc Sommers is at once a history of a nation, the...

Michael McCulloch, "Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers’ Houses in Early Twentieth-Century Detroit" (Temple UP, 2023)

30 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The dream of the modern worker’s house emerged in early twentieth-century America as wage earners gained access to new, larger, and better-equipped ...

Meg Bernhard, "Wine" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

28 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Meg Bernhard about her new book Wine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of...

Allison Christine Meier, "Grave" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

27 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Grave (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Allison C. Meier takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change...

Jenny Linford, "Repast: The Story of Food" (Thames & Hudson, 2025)

26 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Our insatiable appetite for creativity in the kitchen – or around the open fire – is reflected in the fascinating array of objects explored in thi...

Lauren E. M. Everett, "Fortunate People in a Fortunate Land: At Home in Santa Monica's Rent-Controlled Housing" (Temple UP, 2025)

26 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Rent control and other tenant protections have profound and positive impacts on individuals’ and communities’ lives. Dr. Lauren Everett’s Fortu...

Micah S. Muscolino, "Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2025)

25 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the 1940s to the 1960s, soil and water conservation measures transformed both the arid, erosion-prone environment of China’s Loess Plateau and ...

Nina Wilen, "Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences" (Oxford UP, 2025)

25 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Sahel has become a focal point of international security interventions, with external actors providing extensive security force assistance (SFA) t...

Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

24 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edg...

Tom White, "Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster" (Repeater, 2025)

23 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Once used extensively in schools, hospitals, and housing, asbestos has taken the lives of millions. Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster (Re...

Stephen D. Hopper, "Eucalyptus" (Reaktion, 2025)

23 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Eucalypts, iconic to Australia, have shaped art, science and landscapes worldwide. With around nine hundred species, from towering giants to compact m...

Sarah Hoiland, "Righteous Sisterhood: The Politics and Power of an All-Women's Motorcycle Club" (Temple UP, 2025)

23 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A righteous sister identifies herself as a biker. She might wrench, or maintain, her own bike, and she prefers to ride with other righteous sisters. ...

Julie Dobrow, "Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage" (NYU Press, 2025)

22 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Like any set of star-crossed lovers, Elaine and Charles came from different worlds. Elaine, an acclaimed childhood poet from a remote corner of the Ma...

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, "Videotape" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

22 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind th...

David Chanoff, "Anthony Benezet: Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

22 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Wilberforce, Clarkson, Wesley. Britain’s great abolitionist activist Granville Sharp. Each of these consequential figures of the eighteenth-century ...

Margaret Grace Myers, "The Fight for Sex Ed: The Century-Long Battle Between Truth and Doctrine" (Beacon Press, 2025)

21 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The US has some of the highest rates of STIs and teen pregnancies in the industrialized world. A comprehensive sex education curriculum—which teache...

Killian Clarke, "Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

21 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule? Marshalling original data on counterr...

Emily Winderman, "Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History (JHU Press, 2025)

19 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How did three words come to carry the weight of America's abortion debates? In Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History (JHU Press, 2025), Dr. Emil...

Christina Jerne, "Opposition by Imitation: The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia Activism" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

19 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For more than 150 years, Italy has been home to a resilient and evolving resistance against the pervasive influence of mafias. While these criminal or...

Max Adams and Colm O’Brien, "Northumbria AD 367-867: Earth Hall, Ring Gift and Heaven’s Field" (Birlinn, 2025)

18 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The story of the lands between the Forth and Humber from the end of the Roman period to the Viking kingdom of York is one of the most richly fascinati...

John Goodall, "The Castle: A History" (Yale UP, 2022)

17 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In The Castle: A History (Yale University Press, 2022) Dr. John Goodall presents a vibrant history of the castle in Britain, from the early Middle A...

Michelle McSweeney, "OK" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

17 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

"OK" as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees)....

Sonia Faleiro, "The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism Is Shaping Modern Asia" (Columbia UP, 2025)

14 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When the robe becomes a weapon, who can stop the violence? We think of Buddhism as a faith of peace—rooted in compassion, patience, and nonviolence...

Tracy Borman, "The Stolen Crown: Treachery, Deceit and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025)

12 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the long and dramatic annals of British history, no transition from one monarch to another has been as fraught and consequential as that which ende...

Joshua Castellino, "Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment" (Policy Press, 2025)

04 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

While decolonization liberated territories, it left the root causes of historical injustice unaddressed. Governance change did not address past wrongs...

Rebecca van Laer, "Cat" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

03 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Rebecca van Laer and her partner purchase a home and move in with their senior cats, Toby and Gus. Their loved ones see this as a step toward an i...

Sarah Griswold, "Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate" (Cornell UP, 2025)

03 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate (Cornell UP, 2025), Dr. Sarah Griswold shows how the Levant became a crucial front in ...

Graeme Rigby, "Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring" (Hurst Publishers, 2025)

03 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring: Adventures with the King of Fishes (Hurst, 2025) by Graeme Rigby contains almost everything you didn’t know...

Elizabeth Currie, "Street Style: Art and Dress in the Time of Caravaggio" (Reaktion, 2025)

02 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In late sixteenth-century Rome, artists found inspiration in bustling streets and taverns, depicting soldiers, Romani fortune tellers, sex workers and...

Linda Upham-Bornstein, "'Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender': Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law during the Great Depression" (Temple UP, 2023)

02 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

During the Great Depression, the proliferation of local taxpayers’ associations was dramatic and unprecedented. The justly concerned members of thes...

Jessica Campbell, "The Brontës and the Fairy Tale" (Ohio UP, 2024)

01 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Brontës and the Fairy Tale (Ohio UP, 2024) by Dr. Jessica Campbell is the first comprehensive study devoted to the role of fairy tales and folkl...

Martin Moore and Thomas Colley, "Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News" (Columbia UP, 2025)

01 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is ...

Claudia Gastrow, "The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda" (UNC Press Books, 2024)

31 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola’s three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reim...

Tamar Mitts, "Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism" (Princeton UP, 2025)

31 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the ...

John Blair, "Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World" (Princeton UP, 2025)

30 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World (Princeton UP, 2025) by Professor John Blair provides the first in-depth, globa...

Nora Kenworthy, "Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare" (MIT Press, 2024)

30 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare (MIT Press, 2024), Dr. Nora Kenworthy presents an eye-opening investigation into charitabl...

Theresa Muñoz, "Archivum" (Pavillion Poetry at Liverpool UP, 2025)

29 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Archivum (Pavillion Poetry at Liverpool UP, 2025) by Dr. Theresa Muñoz is a book – wise, funny and inventive by turn – that explores what it mea...

Edmond Smith, "Ruthless: A New History of Britain’s Rise to Wealth and Power, 1660-1800" (Yale UP, 2025)

28 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Was Britain’s industrial revolution the result of its machines, which produced goods with miraculous efficiency? Was it the country’s natural abun...

Rick A López, "Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570-1914" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

28 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what ...

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

27 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Jennifer Barry confront...

Roger Moorhouse, "Wolfpack: Hitler’s U-Boat War 1939-45" (HarperCollins, 2025)

26 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Winston Churchill famously remarked that the threat of the German U-Boats was the only thing that had “really frightened” him during World War Two...

Julia Fawcett, "Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

25 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In September 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery on Pudding Lane grew until it had destroyed four-fifths of central London. The rebuilding efforts that f...

Hector Vera, "Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America" (Vanderbilt UP, 2025)

25 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its...

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...

Tami Parr, "Goats in America: A Cultural History" (Oregon State UP, 2025)

23 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The humble goat has played a surprising and important role throughout the history of the United States. Despite this, goats are often overlooked by ma...

Megan Walsh, "The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters" (Columbia Global Reports, 2022)

21 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What does contemporary China’s diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot: ...

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)

19 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...

Hari Krishna Kaul, "For Now, It Is Night: Stories" (NYRB, 2024)

18 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Hari Krishna Kaul’s short stories, shaped by the social crisis and political instability in Kashmir, explore – with a sharp eye for detail, biting...

Arnar Eggert Thoroddsen, "Icelandic Pop: Then, Today, Tomorrow, Next Week" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

18 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Iceland punches well above its weight in the world of music, producing global icons like Björk, Sigur Rós, Of Monsters and Men, and Laufey, while at...

Nancy Newman, "Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York: Including Twenty-Two New Settings of Period Tunes" (SUNY Press, 2025)

18 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Upstate New York's Anti-Rent Movement is considered the last struggle over feudalism in the United States. Tenant farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk region ...

James Grehan, "Empire of Manners: Ottoman Sociability and War-Making in the Long Eighteenth Century" (Stanford UP, 2025)

17 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It is easy to believe that manners are empty gestures, little more than social artifice or practiced etiquette whose sole purpose is to project civili...

Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, "Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy: The Mechanics, Costs, Risks, and Rewards" (Brepols, 2025)

17 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy: The Mechanics, Costs, Risks, and Rewards (Brepols, 2025) by Dr. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio focuses on eno...

Thomas Smith, "Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

16 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Between 1095 ...

Thomas Smith, "Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

16 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Between 1095 ...

Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko "In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos" (MIT Press, 2023)

15 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos (MIT Press, 2023) is an absorbing exploration of Soviet-era family photographs that demonstra...

Emily Gee, "Hostel, House and Chambers: Accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian Working Woman" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

15 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Hostel, House and Chambers: Accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian Working Woman (Liverpool University Press, 2025) by Emily Gee is the first comp...

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...

Gustav Meibauer, "The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument" (Policy Press, 2025)

12 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Suggested additional channels: Political Science, National Security, American Politics, Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern European Studies, New Books wi...

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...

David Singerman, "Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

11 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long a...

Meghan Crnic, "The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores" (U Washington Press, 2025)

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For centuries, the ocean was seen as a place of danger and work, but by the late nineteenth century, northeastern shores of the United States became t...

Nick Higham, "Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As the First World War drew to a close and regimes began to collapse across Europe, British officials plotted a daring campaign to send an unlikely ba...

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...

Susannah Fisher, "Sink Or Swim: How the World Needs to Adapt to a Changing Climate" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The world needs to adapt to climate change – but how? What are the key problems and hard choices that lie ahead for the global community? Sink or S...

Zara Anishanslin, "The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2025)

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists...

Justine De Young, "The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

06 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Using artworks by Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and others, The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern ...

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

06 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...

Jill Elaine Hasday, "We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality" (Oxford UP, 2025)

05 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for "We the People", too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society inclu...

Meredith L. Roman, "The Black Panthers and the Soviets: A Comparative History of Human Rights Movements" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

05 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The contemporaneous movements for human rights that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers waged during the 1960s are analysed in a comparativ...

1,000 Episodes with Miranda Melcher

02 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode marks a milestone for NBN host Dr. Miranda Melcher - 1,000 NBN interviews! This episode is a little different because she sits in the g...

Eric T. Jennings, "Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean" (Yale UP, 2025)

02 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings—so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days—and yet it is everywher...

Eibhear Walshe and Eleanor Fitzsimons, "Speranza: Poems by Jane Wilde" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

01 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Speranza: Poems by Jane Wilde (Liverpool UP, 2025) by Dr. Eibhear Walshe and Dr. Eleanor Fitzsimons is the first contemporary edition of the poetry o...

Rosemary Admiral, "Living Law: Women and Legality in Marinid Morocco" (Syracuse UP, 2025)

29 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Rosemary Admiral provides a groundbreaking history of women’s legal engagement in Marinid Morocco between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries...

Gina Vale, "The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State" (Oxford UP, 2024)

29 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Gina Vale explores the governance of the Islamic State (IS) terrori...

Karen Stollznow, "Bitch: The Journey of a Word" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

28 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Bitch is a bitch of a word. It used to be a straightforward insult, but today – after so many variations and efforts to reject or reclaim the word –...

Karen Stollznow, "Bitch: The Journey of a Word" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

28 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Bitch is a bitch of a word. It used to be a straightforward insult, but today – after so many variations and efforts to reject or reclaim the word –...

Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth, "Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector" (Lund Humphries, 2025)

27 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector (Lund Humphries, 2025) emphasises Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812-1895) — also known as Lady C...

Vanessa Warne, "By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

27 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture (U Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Vanessa Warne demonstrates how reading by touch n...

Aaron Cayer, "Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire" (U California Press, 2025)

26 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

By the end of the twentieth century, US architecture and engineering firms held more capital than entire countries, employed more people than were hou...

Fiona J. Mackenzie, "The Cadence of a Song: The Life of Margaret Fay Shaw" (Birlinn, 2025)

25 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The American-born folklorist and musician Margaret Fay Shaw’s passion for the Hebrides led her to the island of South Uist in 1929 and then to Canna...

Debra Michals, "She's the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

25 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the years after World War II, as women were being pushed from wartime jobs for returning soldiers, government and business leaders—and women them...

Emily Vine, "Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion in Early Modern London" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Early modern London has long been recognised as a centre of religious diversity, yet the role of the home as the setting of religious practice for all...

Mark Archuleta, "The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr: From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again" (U North Texas Press, 2025)

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1921 headlines across the country announced the death of Henry Starr, a burgeoning silent film star who was killed while attempting to rob a bank i...

Kate Haulman, "The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

23 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In May 1894, President Grover Cleveland gave a speech thanking those who gathered “to worship at this national shrine.” He was not referring to th...

Katherine L. French, "Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

23 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Black Death that arrived in the spring of 1348 eventually killed nearly half of England's population. In its long aftermath, wages in London rose ...

Bob Wyss, "Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal" (University of California Press, 2025)

22 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For decades coal has been crucial to America's culture, society, and environment, an essential ingredient in driving out winter's cold, cooking meals,...

Karen Robert, "Driving Terror: Labor, Violence, and Justice in Cold War Argentina" (U New Mexico Press, 2025)

21 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Driving Terror: Labor, Violence, and Justice in Cold War Argentina (U New Mexico Press, 2025) by Dr. Karen Robert tells the story of twenty-four Ford...