New Books with Miranda Melcher

Lindsay O'Neill, "The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey Into and Out of Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for Englan...

Martyn Percy, "The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England" (Hurst, 2025)

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England (Hurst, 2025) by Dr. Martyn Percy offers a bold and unsettlin...

Asheesh Kapur Siddique, "The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World" (Yale UP, 2024)

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two ocea...

Melinda Cooper, "Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance" (Zone Books, 2024)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over s...

Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023)

17 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfu...

Samar Al-Bulushi, "War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror" (Stanford UP, 2024)

17 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since Kenya's invasion of Somalia in 2011, the Kenyan state has been engaged in direct combat with the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, conducting ai...

Marcel Elias, "English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291-1453" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The period from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) witnessed the production of a substantial corpus o...

Jacqueline M. Burek, "Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century" (York Medieval Press, 2023)

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore,...

Hunter Price, "Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty" (U Virginia Press, 2024)

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the early years of American independence, Methodism emerged as the new republic’s fastest growing religious movement and its largest voluntary as...

Jessica A. Brockmole, "Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way Into the Driver's Seat" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since the commercial introduction of the automobile, US automakers have always sought women as customers and advertised accordingly. How, then, did ca...

Adam Pennington, "Henry VIII and the Plantagenet Poles: The Rise and Fall of a Dynasty" (Pen and Sword History, 2024)

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The story of King Henry VIII, a man who married six times only to execute two of those wives, is part of Great Britain’s national and international ...

Marie-France Fortin, "The King Can Do No Wrong: Constitutional Fundamentals, Common Law History, and Crown Liability" (Oxford UP, 2024)

14 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

'The king can do no wrong' remains one of the most fundamental yet misunderstood tenets of the common law tradition. Confusion over the phrase's histo...

Patricia Owens, "Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men" (Princeton UP, 2025)

13 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role ...

Philip Howell, "Pub" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object L...

Magdalena Buchczyk, "Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, History and Ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

10 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, history and ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Magdalena...

Edward Simon, "The Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues: A Visual History" (Cernunnos, 2024)

10 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A companion piece to Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, Seven Sins and Seven Virtues (Abram...

Katie Beisel Hollenbach, "The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom" (Oxford UP, 2024)

09 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsi...

Martín Alberto Gonzalez, "Why You Always So Political?: The Experiences and Resiliencies of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx Students in Higher Education" (Viva Oxnard, 2023)

08 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As of 2018, only about one in ten Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx (MMAX) students graduate with a college degree. Drawing on in-depth interviews, part...

Hiroshi Motomura, "Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair, Realistic, and Sustainable Immigration Policy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

08 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex...

Emily E K Murdoch on the Governess Bureau Series

08 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When the nobility and gentility of England are at their wits end, they send a discrete note to Miss Vivienne Clarke’s Governess Bureau. Only accepti...

Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro, "Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia" (Cornell UP, 2024)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing sch...

Zai Liang. "From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States" (U California Press, 2023)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States (University of California Press, 2024...

Neil Fox, "Music Films: Documentaries, Concert Films and Other Cinematic Representations of Popular Music" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

05 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Music Films: Documentaries, Concert Films and Other Cinematic Representations of Popular Music (Bloomsbury, 2024), Dr. Neil Fox considers a broad...

Daniel Oberhaus, "The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum" (MIT Press, 2025)

04 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can't afford or can't access tr...

D. C. Helmuth, "Hidden Libraries: The World's Most Unusual Book Depositories" (Lonely Planet, 2024)

04 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Hidden Libraries: The World’s Most Unusual Book Depositories (Lonely Planet, 2024) by Diana Helmuth, discover 50 of the world's most magnificen...

Marijam Did, "Everything to Play For: An Insider's Guide to How Videogames are Changing Our World" (Verso, 2024)

03 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World (Verso, 2024) by Marijiam Did asks if videogames can achieve egalitarian goals instead ...

Angela Wanhalla et al., "Te Hau Kainga: The Maori Home Front during the Second World War" (Auckland UP, 2024)

02 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Taking readers to the farms and factories, the marae and churches where Māori lived, worked and raised their families, Te Hau Kāinga: The Māori Ho...

Blessin Adams, "Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain" (HarperCollins, 2025)

02 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Early Modern Britain was awash with pamphlets, ballads, woodcuts broadcasting bloodthirsty tales of traitorous wives, greedy mistresses, cunning femal...

Yves Rees, "Travelling to Tomorrow: How Australia's Modern Women Pioneered Our Romance with the United States" (New South, 2024)

02 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A celebrity decorator with blue hair. A single mother who advised JFK in the Oval Office. A Christian nudist with a passion for almond milk. As explor...

Helen Louise Cowie, "Animals in World History" (Routledge, 2024)

01 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Animals in World History (Routledge, 2024) by Dr. Helen Cowie provides a concise synthesis of human-animal relations over time, charting shifting att...

Amanda Lagji, "Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time: Waiting for Now" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

01 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time: Waiting for Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) by Dr. Amanda Lagji reveals the fundamental, constitutive ...

Mirca Madianou, "Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful" (Polity, 2024)

01 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are ...

Kim Pernell, "Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation" (Princeton UP, 2024)

31 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The global financial crisis of the late 2000s was marked by the failure of regulators to rein in risk-taking by banks. And yet regulatory issues varie...

Dan Archer, "Voices from Nepal: Uncovering Human Trafficking through Comics Journalism" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

31 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How can we better protect survivors? How can we learn from their stories without causing further harm? With a pen in one hand and watercolours in the ...

Elizabeth Campbell, "Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe" (Oxford UP, 2024)

29 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the fa...

Vera Keller, "Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

27 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How did the research universities of the Enlightenment come into being? And what debt do they owe to scholars of the previous era? Focusing on the car...

Taylor N. Carlson, "Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

26 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Accurate information is at the heart of democratic functioning. For decades, researchers interested in how information is disseminated have focused on...

Erica Borgstrom and Renske Visser, "Critical Approaches to Death, Dying and Bereavement" (Routledge, 2024)

26 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Critical Approaches to Death, Dying and Bereavement (Routledge, 2025) by Professor Erica Borgstrom & Dr. Renske Visser is the first of its kind to ex...

Terrence C. Petty, "Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

24 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After World War II, when a new German democracy was born in the western region of the vanquished Third Reich, tens of thousands of civil servants were...

Matthew McCormack, "Shoes and the Georgian Man" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

24 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Shoes are everyday objects but they are loaded with meaning. Shoes and the Georgian Man (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Matthew McCormack reveals how shoe...

Michael Tondre, "Oil" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

23 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to tu...

Ryan Tan Wander, "Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West" (Texas Tech UP, 2024)

23 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In today’s cultural and political climate of relative LGBTQ+ inclusion, Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West (Texas Tec...

Michelle D. Brock, "Plagues of the Heart: Crisis and Covenanting in a Seventeenth-Century Scottish Town" (Manchester UP, 2024)

22 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Using a wide range of archival material and a microhistorical approach, Plagues of the Heart: Crisis and Covenanting in a Seventeenth-Century Scottis...

Andy Wightman, "The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland and How They Got it" (Birlinn, 2025)

22 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Who owns Scotland? How did they get it? What happened to all the common land in Scotland? Has the Scottish Parliament made any difference? Can we get ...

Bianca M. Lopez, "Queen of Sorrows: Plague, Piety, and Power in Late Medieval Italy" (Cornell UP, 2024)

21 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Queen of Sorrows: Plague, Piety, and Power in Late Medieval Italy (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Bianca Lopez takes an original approach to ...

April-Louise Pennant, "Babygirl, You've Got This!: Experiences of Black Girls and Women in the English Education System" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

21 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How do Black women experience education in Britain? Within British educational research about Black students, gender distinctions have been largely ab...

Melanie Dennis Unrau, "The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

19 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and willful ignorance of the extractive industri...

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...

James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024)

18 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the Ame...

Byron Ellsworth Hamann, "The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844" (Getty, 2022)

18 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844 (Getty, 2022) is an architectural history and ...

Eva Payne, "Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution" (Princeton UP, 2024)

18 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international politica...

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. ...

Mariam Motamedi Fraser, "Dog Politics: Species Stories and the Animal Sciences" (Manchester UP, 2024)

15 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Do dogs belong with humans? Scientific accounts of dogs' 'species story,' in which contemporary dog-human relations are naturalised with reference to ...

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 (...

Brett Bannor, "American Sheep: A Cultural History" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

14 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why did Thomas Jefferson write that he would be happy if all dogs went extinct? What economic opportunity did attorney John Lord Hayes envision for th...

Patrick Dixon, "Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

13 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item...

Eleanor Baker, "Book Curses" (Bodleian Library, 2024)

13 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Have you ever wanted to protect your books from forgetful borrowers, merciless page-folders or outright thieves? Perhaps you have even wished harm on ...

Susan A. Brewer, "The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory" (Three Hills, 2024)

12 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Dr. Susan A. Brewer's fascinating The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory (Cornell University Press, 2024), sh...

Jennifer Greenburg, "At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War" (Cornell UP, 2023)

11 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Jennifer Greenburg r...

Edward Jones Corredera, "Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America" (Oxford UP, 2024)

10 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Drawing on new archival sources, this book shows how Latin A...

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...

Rebecca Charbonneau, "Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain" (Polity, 2024)

08 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intellige...

Lisa Sheryl Jacobson. "Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey After Prohibition" (U California Press, 2024)

25 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Dr. Lisa Jacobson r...

Amélie Barras, "Faith in Rights: Christian-Inspired NGOs at Work in the United Nations" (Stanford UP, 2024)

24 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Faith in Rights: Christian-Inspired NGOs at Work in the United Nations (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Amélie Barras explores why and how C...

Paula Fredriksen, "Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years" (Princeton UP, 2024)

23 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The ancient Mediterranean teemed with gods. For centuries, a practical religious pluralism prevailed. How, then, did one particular god come to domina...

Emily Mitchell-Eaton, "New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

22 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-ent...

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...

Melissa Johnston, "Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy: The Failure of Gender Interventions in Timor-Leste" (Oxford UP, 2023)

21 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Over the two decades since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, peacebuilding interventions a...

Chelsea Berry, "Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

20 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultu...

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...

Stephanie Rutherford, "Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022)

18 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A wolf’s howl is felt in the body. Frightening and compelling, incomprehensible or entirely knowable, it is a sound that may be heard as threat or i...

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...

Alissa Klots, "Domestic Service in the Soviet Union; Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

15 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Alissa Klots...

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...

Leslie Beth Ribovich, "Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools" (NYU Press, 2024)

13 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The processes of secularization and desegregation were among the two most radical transformations of the American public school system in all its hist...

Susan Gaunt Stearns. "Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade" (U Virginia Press, 2024)

09 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson pledged his allegiance to the king of Spain. Prior t...

David Cowan, "Politics of the Past: Inter-war Memories and the Making of British Popular Politics, 1939–2009" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

08 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The inter-war period (1918–1939) is still remembered as a period of mass deprivation – the 'hungry thirties'. But how did this impression emerge? ...

Elizabeth Garner Masarik, "The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

24 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

With The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State (University of Georgia Press, 2024), Dr. Elizabeth Garner Masarik ...

Vivian Asimos, "Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity" (Reaktion, 2024)

20 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Cosplay, born from the fusion of ‘costume’ and ‘play’, transcends mere dress-up by transforming enthusiasts of TV shows, movies, books or vide...

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...

Masha Kirasirova, "The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)

19 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the interna...

Park Jeong-Mi, "The State's Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea" (U California Press, 2024)

19 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The State's Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Park Jeong-Mi uncov...

Laura F. Edwards, "Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (Oxford UP, 2022)

18 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What can dresses, bedlinens, waistcoats, pantaloons, shoes, and kerchiefs tell us about the legal status of the least powerful members of American soc...

A. D. Bergin, "The Wicked of the Earth" (Northodox, 2024)

17 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

October, 1650, traumatised Parliamentarian spy James Archer returns north seeking his sister Meg, missing in the aftermath of Newcastle’s recent wit...

Ian Miller, "Self-Esteem: An American History" (Polity Press, 2024)

17 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

By the end of the twentieth century, the idea of self-esteem had become enormously influential. A staggering amount of psychological research and self...

Rachael Litherland and Philly Hare, "People with Dementia at the Heart of Research: Co-Producing Research through The Dementia Enquirers Model" (Jessica Kingsley, 2024)

16 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

People with dementia are uniquely qualified to discuss the challenges of their condition and the features of effective support, but their voices are a...

Erin Lee Mock, "Changed Men: Veterans in American Popular Culture after World War II" (U Virginia Press, 2024)

16 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Millions of GIs returned from overseas in 1945. A generation of men who had left their families and had learned to kill and to quickly dispatch sexual...

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...

Hannah Pollin-Galay, "Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

15 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death...

Richard Schoch, "How Sondheim Can Change Your Life" (Atria Books, 2024)

14 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For fans of musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim is one of the true titans – the genius who brought us Sweeney Todd and West Side Story, Into the Woods...

Scott J. Weiner, "Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

13 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Tribe-state relations are a foundational element of authoritarian bargains in the Middle East, and in particular in the Gulf States. However, the stru...

Stuart Anderson, "Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires: Making Medicines Official in Britain's Imperial World, 1618-1968" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

06 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The word "pharmacopoeia" has come to have many meanings, although it is commonly understood to be a book describing approved compositions and standard...

Melissa Teixeira, "A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal" (Princeton UP, 2024)

05 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Following the Great Depression, as the world searched for new economic models, Brazil and Portugal experimented with corporatism as a “third path”...

Jerry Brotton, "Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction" (Penguin, 2024)

05 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting w...

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...

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 ‘...

Jonathan A. Allan, "Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin" (U Regina Press, 2024)

02 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The “uncut” penis is viewed by some as attractive or erotic, and by others as ugly or undesirable. Secular parents of male infants worry about whe...

Kristina Kolbe, "The Sound of Difference: Race, Class and the Politics of 'Diversity' in Classical Music" (Manchester UP, 2024)

02 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when the elitist space of 'Western' classical music seeks to diversify itself? And what are the social effects worked through diversity d...

Erika Engelhaupt, "Go to Hell: A Traveler's Guide to Earth's Most Otherworldly Destinations" (National Geographic, 2024)

01 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

With Go to Hell: A Traveler's Guide to Earth's Most Otherworldly Destinations (National Geographic, 2024) by Erika Engelhaupt, you can go to hell an...