New Books with Miranda Melcher
Episodes
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...
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...