New Books with Miranda Melcher
Episodes
Stuart McHardy, "Scotland's Sacred Goddess: Hidden in Plain Sight" (Luath, 2025)
21 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Scotland’s Sacred Goddess: Hidden in Plain Sight (Luath Press, 2025), Stuart McHardy delves into the rich tapestry of pre-Christian Scottish be...
Susan Erikson, "Investable! When Pandemic Risk Meets Speculative Finance" (MIT Press, 2025)
20 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Investable! When Pandemic Risk Meets Speculative Finance (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Susan Erikson presents a critical and sobering look at how internat...
Victoria Bateman, "Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power" (Seal Press, 2025)
20 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How many female entrepreneurs, economic revolutionaries, merchants, and industrialists can you name? You would be forgiven for thinking that, until ve...
Shakirah E. Hudani, "Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (U of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Shakirah Hudani examines a “material poli...
Jack Hartnell, "Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image" (Princeton UP, 2025)
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Wound Man—a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely acr...
Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, "The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New Tellings of Half-forgotten Stories from England's 39 Historic Counties" (The History Press, 2025)
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Do you know the legends of the giants who ruled England before the first human kings? What about the demon dog Black Shuck who terrorized sixteenth-ce...
Stephen A. Harris, "50 Plants That Changed the World" (Bodleian Library, 2025)
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever stopped to think about how your morning cappuccino came to be? From the coffee bush that yielded the beans, to the grass for the cattle ...
Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, "Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics" (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025)
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) by Dr. Dominic Davies & Dr. Candida Rifkind is the ...
Katherine Eva Maich, "Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights" (Stanford UP, 2025)
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equ...
Alex R. Tipei, "Unintended Nations: How French Liberals' Empire of Civilization Remade Southeast Europe and the Post-Napoleonic World" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with...
Lucy Sante, "Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (The Experiment, 2022)
14 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware,...
Martin Austin Nesvig, "The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
14 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Dr. Martin Austin Nesvig tells the stories o...
Kevin Passmore, "The Maginot Line: A New History of the Fall of France" (Yale UP, 2025)
13 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone e...
Susan Juster, "A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America" (UNC Press, 2025)
12 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From Nevis to Newfoundland, Catholics were everywhere in English America. But often feared and distrusted, they hid in plain sight, deftly obscuring t...
David Welsh, "The Social Railway and Its Workers in Europes Modern Era, 1880-2023: Moments of Fury, Ramparts of Hope" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
10 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Social Railway and Its Workers in Europe’s Modern Era, 1880-2023: Moments of Fury, Ramparts of Hope (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. David Welsh exami...
Jessica Urwin, "Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia" (U of Washington Press, 2025)
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Though a nonnuclear state, Australia was embroiled in the military and civilian nuclear energy programs of numerous global powers across the twentieth...
Ruth E. Toulson, "Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore" (U Washington Press, 2024)
07 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted w...
Brian Duff, "Restaurant" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
06 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the last few decades, restaurants and food culture have achieved extraordinary cultural presence. Chefs are heroes and thought leaders, well-execut...
Dan Roche, "Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing" (MIT Press, 2025)
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing (MIT Press, 2025) is a book about artificial eyes—about the artisans and artists who make them, and ab...
Daniel Horowitz, "Bear With Me: A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America" (Duke UP, 2025)
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From teddy bears and Winnie-the-Pooh to Smokey Bear, Yogi Bear, and Cocaine Bear, American popular culture has been fascinated with real and fictional...
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, "Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Claire McCardell forever changed fashion—and most importantly, the lives of women. She shattered cultural norms around women’s clothes, and today ...
Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, "Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East" (UP of Colorado, 2025)
04 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) by Dr. Tiffany Earley-Spadoni offers an in-...
Helen C. Epstein, "Why Live: An Anatomy of Suicide Epidemics" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025)
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What causes suicide epidemics—and how can we prevent them? Many suicides are caused by biological mental illness, but sometimes the suicide rate of...
Steven Veerapen, "Witches: A King's Obsession" (Birlin, 2025)
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Witches – whether broomstick-riding spell-casters or Wiccan earth-worshippers – have been culturally relevant for centuries. For centuries, too, b...
Flannery Burke, "Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region" (U Washington Press, 2025)
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Just as easterners imagined the American West, westerners imagined the American East, reshaping American culture. Back East: How Westerners Invented ...
Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen, "The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds Across Landscapes and Imagination" (Reaktion, 2025)
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds across Landscapes and Imagination (Reaktion, 2025), nature writers Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen set ...
David Woodman, "The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom" (Princeton UP, 2025)
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Professor David Woodman is a foundational biog...
Brendan A. Shanahan, "Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865-1965" (Oxford UP, 2025)
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late n...
Catherine Merridale, "Moscow Underground" (HarperColins, 2025)
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Moscow Underground (HarperCollins, 2025) by Dr. Catherine Merridale is a sweeping novel of life, death and politics in the quicksand world of Stalin'...
Rhys Kaminski-Jones, "Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain, 1707-1819: True Britons and Celtic Empires" (Boydell & Brewer, 2025)
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the long eighteenth century, as Britain grappled with the aftermath of the 1707 Acts of Union and consolidated a global empire, Welsh ‘Cambro-Bri...
Andrew Fialka, "Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
30 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Fialka illustrates ...
Laura Murphy, "Freedomville: The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt" (Columbia Global Reports, 2021)
30 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it? Millions of people around the world today are ens...
Jérémy Filet, "The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational Travel and Small-States' Diplomacy" (Manchester UP, 2025)
26 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational travel and small-states' diplomacy (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Jérémy Filet is the fir...
Francesca Stavrakopoulou, "God: An Anatomy" (Knopf, 2022)
25 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words...
Barbara H. Rosenwein, "Winter Dreams: A Historical Guide to Old Age" (Reaktion, 2025)
23 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Winter Dreams: A Historical Guide to Old Age (Reaktion, 2025) is an evocative history of the ways the old have thought, felt and expressed themselves...
Daniel Lomas, "The Secret History of UK Security Vetting from 1909 to the Present" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
22 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Using newly available government records, private papers, and documents obtained through Freedom of Information, The Secret History of UK Vetting fro...
Angela C. Tozer, "The Debt of a Nation: Land and the Financing of the Canadian Settler State, 1820-73" (U of British Columbia Press, 2025)
22 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
You’ve got to speculate to accumulate. We apply that notion to individuals in pursuit of wealth, but what about countries? The Debt of a Nation: La...
Kathleen Wilson, "Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces...
Mariya Grinberg, "Trade in War: Economic Cooperation Across Enemy Lines" (Cornell UP, 2025)
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trade between belligerents during wartime should not occur. After all, exchanged goods might help enemies secure the upper hand on the battlefield. Ye...
Reid B. C. Pauly, "The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma" (Cornell UP, 2025)
18 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Strong states are surprisingly bad at coercion. History shows they prevail only a third of the time. Dr. Pauly argues that coercion often fails becaus...
Michael Hiltzik, "Golden State: The Making of California" (Mariner, 2025)
17 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
California has long reigned as the land of plenty, a place where the sun always shines and opportunity beckons. Even prior to its statehood in 1850, i...
Kate Herrity, "Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown" (Bristol UP, 2024)
16 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The soundscape of prison life is that of constant clangs, bangs and jangles. What is the significance of this cacophonous din to those who live and wo...
Adriana Carranca, "Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims" (Columbia UP, 2024)
16 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
US-born Protestant evangelicalism has gone global to an extent of which many of us might be unaware. Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread ...
Prudence Peiffer, "The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever" (Harper, 2023)
15 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became th...
Sandra Hempel, "Controlling Women: The Untold Story of Britain's First Female Police Force" (Hurst, 2025)
15 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Violence against women is out of control. Conviction rates for rape are so low that most survivors think it pointless to report, or later regret doing...
Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)
09 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising st...
Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, "Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise" (Yale UP, 2022)
26 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Christopher Marquis & Dr. Kunyuan Qiao presents a tho...
Gabriel Ertsgaard, "A Fiction Writer’s Guide to Peace: Crafting Nonviolent Heroism" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Superhero violence and graphic action sequences are prevalent on the screen and on the page, but this book takes an alternative route with practical g...
Meegan Kennedy, "Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism" (Oxford UP, 2025)
18 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Meegan Kennedy examines a revolutionary period in microscopi...
David Engerman, "Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made" (Oxford UP and Penguin RandomHouse South Asia, 2025)
17 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Oxford University Press and Penguin RandomHouse South Asia, 2025) by Dr. David Enger...
Haley Cohen Gilliland, "A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
16 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the early hours of March 24, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumble with tanks as soldiers seize the presidential palace and topple Argentina’s...
Kelly A. Spring, "SPAM: A Global History" (Reaktion, 2025)
16 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a conflict that solidified SPAM’s place in global food culture. Created...
Cat Dawson, "Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists Is Shaping the Memorial Landscape" (MIT Press, 2025)
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled bot...
Renay Richardson and Arisa Loomba, "Human Resources: Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain" (Profile Books, 2025)
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ordinary items take on new meanings when you cast them in different light. The origins of tea, coffee and sugar are well known, but when you discover ...
Aditi Sahasrabuddhe, "Bankers' Trust: How Social Relations Avert Global Financial Collapse" (Cornell UP, 2025)
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Central bank cooperation during global financial crises has been anything but consistent. While some crises are arrested with extensive cooperation, o...
Andréa Becker, "Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy" (NYU Press, 2025)
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At least one hysterectomy is performed every minute of the year, making it the most common gynecological surgery worldwide. By the age of sixty-five, ...
Rosemary Goring, "Exile: The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots" (Berlinn, 2025)
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From the moment Mary, Queen of Scots set foot on English soil in 1568 until her execution at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February 1587, she was the priso...
Juliet Rix, "London's Statues of Women" (SafeHaven Books, 2025)
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
No-one can fail to notice how many statues of Great Men there are around London: stern politicians, military generals, imperial adventurers . . . But ...
Aggie Hirst, "Politics of Play: Wargaming with the US Military" (Oxford UP, 2024)
13 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A wargaming renaissance has been underway in the US military. Having proven to be the most effective recruitment tool of the 21st century, games have ...
Kevin J. Tracey, "The Great Nerve: The New Science of the Vagus Nerve and How to Harness Its Healing Reflexes" (Penguin, 2025)
12 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The vagus nerve is fundamental to our health and vitality, coordinating critical functions from the precise heartbeat we need to exercise or rest to t...
Andrew Herscher, "Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
12 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, Anishinaabe leaders granted land to a college where their children could be educated. At the time, the colonial sett...
Ignacio G. Galán, "Furnishing Fascism: Modernist Design and Politics in Italy" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
12 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Along with the rise of Mussolini’s fascist regime, the interwar years in Italy also saw the widespread development of its modernist interior design ...
Tom Waidzunas et al., "Out Doing Science: LGBTQ STEM Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times" (UMass Press, 2025)
11 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past 50 years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer professionals have organized to achieve greater inclusion into the fields of sc...
Phil Tiemeyer, "Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants" (Cornell UP, 2025)
11 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants (Cornell University Press, 2025) is a global history of postwar aviation th...
Kirstie Macleod, "The Red Dress: Conversations in Stitch" (Quickthorn, 2025)
09 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Red Dress: Conversations in Stitch (Quickthorn, 2025), shares the deeper story of The Red Dress, its embroiderers and Kirstie Macleod's own story...
Susan L. Carruthers, "Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine a world in which clothing wasn't superabundant – cheap, disposable, indestructible – but perishable, threadbare and chronically scarce. Ei...
Margaret Cook Andersen, "Fertile Expectations: The Politics of Involuntary Childlessness in Twentieth-Century France" (Manchester UP, 2025)
06 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An engaging history of motherhood, demography, and infertility in twentieth-century France, Fertile expectations: The politics of involuntary childle...
Kevin Guyan, "Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
05 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Kevin Guyan reveals how the fight for LGBTQ equalit...
Daanika Kamal, "Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women" (Oxford UP, 2025)
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Pakistani women are increasingly pursuing legal avenues against acts of domestic violence. Their claims, however, are often dismissed through characte...
Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira, "Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France" (MIT Press, 2025)
02 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On August 27, 1783, a large crowd gathered in Paris to watch the first ascent of a hydrogen balloon. Despite the initial feverish enthusiasm, by the m...
Sam Dalrymple, "Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia" (HarperCollins UK, 2025)
02 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – ...
Sarah Gold McBride "Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America" (Harvard UP, 2025)
29 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on decisive new significance as the young nati...
Elena Jackson Albarran, "Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas" (Brill, 2024)
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A class of child artists in Mexico, a ship full of child refugees from Spain, classrooms of child pageant actors, and a pair of boy ambassadors reveal...
Tie Ning, Annelise Finegan trans., "My Sister's Red Shirt" (Sinoist Books, 2025)
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Growing up in a glittering new decade of possibility, Anran is radically different to her sister. Outspoken and idealistic, she relishes in challengin...
Philip Kadish, "The Great White Hoax: Frauds, Forgeries, and 200 Years of Selling Racism in America"
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Fake news, outright political lies, a shamelessly partisan press, and the collapse of truth, civility, and shared facts, Dr. Philip Kadish argues, are...
Matthew Allen, "Drink and Democracy: Alcohol and the Political Imaginary in Colonial Australia" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)
23 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The nineteenth-century spread of democracy in Britain and its colonies coincided with an increase in alcohol consumption and in celebratory public din...
Lieba Faier, "The Banality of Good: The UN's Global Fight Against Human Trafficking" (Duke UP, 2024)
22 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Banality of Good: The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2024), Dr. Lieba Faier examines why contemporary ...
Vivian Kong, "Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong, 1910–45" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
22 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to be British? To answer this, Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong, 1910–45 (Cambridge UP, 2023) by Dr. Vivian...
Claire Pierson, "Women's Troubles: Gender and Feminist Politics in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland" (Manchester University Press, 2025)
21 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do feminist movements develop and organise in ethno-nationally divided societies? How does this challenge our understandings of contemporary fourt...
John Barr, "1960s University Buildings: The Golden Age of British Modern Architecture" (Lund Humphries, 2025)
21 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The 1960s continue to hold an almost mythical place in Western culture, particularly in Britain, where change was widespread and infiltrated many aspe...
Jeremy Stolow, "Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography" (MIT Press, 2025)
20 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Jeremy Stolow is the first book of its kind: an extended historical, anthropological, and...
David Crystal, "Bookish Words and Their Surprising Stories" (Bodleian Library, 2025)
20 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Bookish Words & their Surprising Stories (Bodleian, 2025) by Dr. David Crystal, explore how books have played a pivotal role in the history of En...
Emily Hauser, "Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It" (Univ of Chicago Press, 2025)
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Achilles. Agamemnon. Odysseus. Hector. The lives of these and many other men in the greatest epics of ancient Greece have been pored over endlessly in...
James D. Brown, "Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge" (Hurst, 2025)
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Richard Sorge is one of history’s most famous spies. This hard-drinking, womanising, motorcycle-crashing Soviet officer penetrated the German embass...
Emily Webber, "Mining Men: Britain's Last Kings of the Coalface" (Penguin, 2025)
18 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The story of the last generation of British miners: fathers and sons, brothers and comrades, big hitters and broken men, strikers and scabs. Mining M...
Violet Moller, "Inside the Stargazer's Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Europe" (OneWorld, 2024)
18 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption. A new age was coming into vi...
Frederick Reece, "Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon" (Oxford University Press, 2025)
17 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We all know about art forgeries, but why write fake classical music? In Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon (Oxford U...
Mark Somos, Matthew Cleary, Pablo Dufour, Edward Jones Corredera, and Emanuele Salerno, "The Unseen History of International Law" (Oxford UP, 2025)
17 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Unseen History of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2025) locates and describes almost one thousand surviving copies of the first nine ...
L. Sasha Gora, "Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada" (University of Toronto Press, 2025)
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2025) by Dr. L. Sasha Gora explores the complex relationships...
Barbara Allen, "Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds: Stories of Extinction" (Reaktion, 2025)
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds: Stories of Extinction (Reaktion, 2025) by Reverend Barbara Allen presents thirty-one extinct species through the p...
Brent Z. Kaup and Kelly F. Austin, "The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease" (U of California Press, 2025)
14 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Brent Z. Kaup & Dr. Kelly F. Austi...
Samuel Rutherford, "Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860-1939" (Oxford UP, 2025)
14 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, universities were one of many institutional state structures wherein gender differenc...
Alison Griffiths, "Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film" (Columbia UP, 2025)
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From In Borneo, the Land of the Head-Hunters to The Epic of Everest to Camping Among the Indians, the early twentieth century was the heyday of ex...
Sarah Bilston, "The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession" (Harvard UP, 2025)
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1818, a curious root arrived in a small English village, tucked—seemingly by accident—in a packing case mailed from Brazil. The amateur botanis...
Sladja Blažan, "Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America" (University of Virginia Press, 2025)
08 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America (University of Virginia Press, 2025), Dr. Sladja Blažan explain...
Harrison Browne and Rachel Browne, "Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes" (Beacon Press, 2025)
08 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The debate over the inclusion of gender diverse people in sport has become the latest battleground in the fight for basic human rights and equality. T...
Jenn Hobbs, "Bodily Fluids, Fluid Bodies and International Politics: Feminist Technoscience, Biopolitics and Security" (Bristol University Press, 2024)
07 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In recent years, security actors have become increasingly concerned with health issues. Bodily Fluids, Fluid Bodies and International Politics: Femin...
Anthony C. Infanti, "The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America" (NYU Press, 2025)
03 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America (NYU Press, 2025) by Anthony C. Infanti documents how the American colonies used tax law to ...
Bonnie Yochelson, "Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen" (Fordham UP, 2025)
03 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen (Fordham University Press, 2025) by Dr. Bonnie Yochelson, explore Gilded A...
Coll Thrush, "Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific" (University of Washington Press, 2025)
03 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as th...