New Books with Miranda Melcher

Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange, "Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

23 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Jane Hamlett & Dr. Julie-Marie Strange tracks the British love ...

Rob Drew, "Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable" (Duke UP, 2023)

20 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster encla...

Kate Morgan, "The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History" (Mudlark, 2024)

19 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

'A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.' So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of P...

Mari Takayanagi and Elizabeth Hallam Smith, "Necessary Women: The Untold Story of Parliament's Working Women" (The History Press, 2023)

18 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When suffragette Emily Wilding Davison hid overnight in the Houses of Parliament in 1911 to have her name recorded in the census there, she may not ha...

Anna Brinkman, "Balancing Strategy: Sea Power, Neutrality, and Prize Law in the Seven Years' War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

18 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is the relationship between seapower, law, and strategy? In Balancing Strategy: Seapower, Neutrality, and Prize-Law in the Seven Years' War (Ca...

Joan E. Cho, "Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

17 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

South Korea is sometimes held as a dream case of modernization theory, a testament to how economic development leads to democracy. Seeds of Mobilisat...

Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson, "Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade" (Harvard UP, 2024)

16 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China...

Tessa Winkelmann, "Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946" (Cornell UP, 2023)

15 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. T...

Liliana Doganova, "Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology" (Princeton UP, 2024)

14 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book D...

Shelley X. Liu, "Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-War Statebuilding" (Oxford UP, 2024)

13 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-war Statebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Shelley X. Liu explores how wartime processes ...

Siân E. Grønlie, "The Old Testament in Medieval Icelandic Texts: Translation, Exegesis and Storytelling" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

13 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The historical narratives of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible have much in common with Icelandic saga literature: both are invested in origins and genea...

Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming, "Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life" (Routledge, 2023)

12 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life (Routledge, 2023) by Dr. Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming caref...

Joanne Edge, "Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain: Questioning Life, Predicting Death" (York Medieval Press, 2024)

11 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When will I die? What is the sex of my unborn child? Which of two rivals will win a duel? As today, people in the later Middle Ages approached their u...

Maggie Messitt, "Newspaper" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

09 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Newspaper (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Maggie Messitt is about more than news printed on paper. It brings us inside our best and worst selves, from cens...

Kris Butler, "Drink Maps in Victorian Britain" (Bodleian Library, 2024)

08 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is a ‘drink map’? It may sound like a pub guide, yet it actually refers to a type of late nineteenth-century British map designed specificall...

Julia Havas, "Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television" (Wayne State UP, 2022)

08 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

While American television has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming's cultural value, Woman Up...

John Powers, "Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture" (Oxford UP, 2023)

04 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies tha...

Michael Gilson, "Behind the Privet Hedge: Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

03 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Britain is a nation of gardeners; the suburban garden, with its roses and privet hedges, is widely admired and copied across the world. But it is litt...

Nadine A. Sinno, "A War of Colors: Graffiti and Street Art in Postwar Beirut" (U Texas Press, 2024)

02 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Over the last two decades in Beirut, graffiti makers have engaged in a fierce “war of colors,” seeking to disrupt and transform the city’s physi...

Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen, "Brand Antarctica: How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

01 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Antarctica is, and has always been, very much “for sale.” Whales, seals, and ice have all been marketed as valuable commodities, but so have the s...

Jennifer M. Black, "Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

01 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the early nineteenth century, the American commercial marketplace was a chaotic, unregulated environment in which knock-offs and outright frauds th...

Jaume Aurell, "What Is a Classic in History?: The Making of a Historical Canon" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

30 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is a classic in historical writing? How do we explain the continued interest in certain historical texts, even when their accounts and interpreta...

Victoria Sparey, "Shakespeare's Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture" (Manchester UP, 2024)

30 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Shakespeare's Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Victoria Spar...

Adia Harvey Wingfield, "Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It" (Amistad Press, 2023)

30 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to a...

Adrian Tinniswood, "Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House" (Basic Books, 2021)

28 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the we...

John H. Cable, "Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi" (UP of Kansas, 2023)

28 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Historians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming—the “Southern enclosure movement”—...

Michael De Groot, "Disruption: The Global Economic Shocks of the 1970s and the End of the Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2024)

28 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Disruption: The Global Economic Shocks of the 1970s and the End of the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Michael De Groot argues tha...

Sarah A. Bendall, "Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

28 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This very structured form, created using garments cal...

Tabea Alexa Linhard, "Unexpected Routes: Refugee Writers in Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2023)

26 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Unexpected Routes: Refugee Writers in Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Tabea Alexa Linhard chronicles the refugee journeys of six writ...

Dana Gorzelany-Mostak, "Tracks on the Trail: Popular Music, Race, and the US Presidency" (U Michigan Press, 2023)

26 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From Bill Clinton playing his saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show to Barack Obama referencing Jay-Z's song "Dirt Off Your Shoulder," politicians have...

Pamela Robertson Wojcik, "Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema" (U California Press, 2024)

24 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Pamela Roberston Wojcik examines Ame...

Danielle Taschereau Mamers, "Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentation, Administration, and the Interventions of Indigenous Art" (Fordham UP, 2023)

23 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How do bureaucratic documents create and reproduce a state’s capacity to see? What kinds of worlds do documents help create? Further, how might such...

Gary S. Cross, "Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal" (NYU Press, 2024)

23 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Free time, one of life’s most precious things, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the pa...

Julie Peakman, "Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis" (Reaktion, 2024)

22 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Julie Peakman investigates the sex lives of women from 1680 to 183...

John Tolan, "England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

22 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied importa...

Jessica Cox, "Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (The History Press, 2023)

21 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Covering a fascinating period of population growth, high infant mortality and deep social inequality, rapid medical advances and pseudoscientific quac...

Fumilayo Showers, "Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

21 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As the U.S. population ages and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increase...

Amanda Wunder, "Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV" (Yale UP, 2024)

20 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV (Yale University Press, 2024) by Dr. Amanda Wunder is the first archival...

Heather Parry, "Electric Dreams: Sex Robots and Failed Promises of Capitalism" (404 Ink, 2024)

20 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the future, we’ll all be having sex with robots… won’t we? Roboticists say they’re a distracting science fiction, yet endless books, films ...

Stephen Morillo, "War and Conflict in the Middle Ages" (Polity Press, 2022)

20 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In War and Conflict in the Middle Ages (Polity, 2022), Dr. Stephen Morillo offers the first global history of armed conflict between 540 and 1500 or...

Diana Leon-Boys, "Elena, Princesa of the Periphery: Disney’s Flexible Latina Girl" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

19 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the summer of 2016, Disney introduced its first Latina princess, Elena of Avalor. Elena, Princess of the Periphery: Disney’s Flexible Latina Gir...

Nicholas Terpstra, "Senses of Space in the Early Modern World" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

19 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How did early moderns experience sense and space? How did the expanding cultural, political, and social horizons of the period emerge out of those exp...

Lorenza B. Fontana, "Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

18 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lorenza B. Fontana is a pioneering...

Liz Tregenza, "Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930-70" (Bloombury, 2023)

17 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930-70 (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Liz Tregenza seeks to revise the notion that wholesale couturiers were simply...

Victoria Flexner and Jay Reifel, "A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes" (Rizoli, 2023)

16 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For every lover of food culture, A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes (Rizzoli, 2023) by Victoria Flexner and Jay Reifel p...

Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo, "How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400 Year History" (Reaktion, 2024)

16 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Sixteenth-century Spain was small, poor, disunited and sparsely populated. Yet the Spaniards and their allies built the largest empire the world had e...

Annaliese Jacobs Claydon, "Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

15 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1845 an expedition led by Sir John Franklin vanished in the Canadian Arctic. The enduring obsession with the Franklin mystery, and in particular In...

Sharrona Pearl, "Mask" (Bloombury, 2024)

14 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From the theatre mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument fo...

Stewart Lawrence Sinclair, "Space Rover" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

13 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1971, the first lunar rover arrived on the moon. The design became an icon of American ingenuity and the adventurous spirit and vision many equated...

Egor Lazarev, "State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

13 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Egor Lazarev explores the use ...

Zhang Ling, "Aftershock" (Amazon Crossing, 2024)

12 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the summer of 1976, an earthquake swallows up the city of Tangshan, China. Among the hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for survival is a m...

Brooke Larson, "The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia" (Duke UP, 2023)

11 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Bringing into dialogue the fields of social history, Andean ethnography, and postcolonial theory, The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous E...

Elizabeth Coggeshall, "On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

08 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Although we often think of friendship today as an indisputable value of human social life, for thinkers and writers across late mediaeval Christian so...

Adele Oliver, "Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture & Criminalisation of UK Drill" (404 Ink, 2023)

07 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture & Criminalisation of UK Drill (404 Ink, 2023) by Adèle Oliver shines a critical light on UK drill and its fraught r...

Marc Edelman, "Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change" (Cornell UP, 2024)

06 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marc Edelman...

Sandra Fox, "The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America" (Stanford UP, 2023)

06 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic ...

Kieran File, "How Language Shapes Relationships in Professional Sports Teams: Power and Solidarity Dynamics in a New Zealand Rugby Team" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

05 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

While the topic of relationships in professional sports teams is gaining greater attention from researchers and practitioners, the role that coach and...

Stefanos Geroulanos, "The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins" (Liveright, 2024)

04 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings an...

Louis Howard Porter, "Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination" (Oxford UP, 2023)

04 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Before Josef Stalin's death in 1953, the USSR had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with noncommunist international organisations. Although it had ...

Matthieu Grandpierron, "Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2024)

02 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Why do great powers go to war? Why are non-violent, diplomatic options not prioritised? Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Po...

Diane Winston, "Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan's Evangelical Vision" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

01 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

After two years in the White House, an aging and increasingly unpopular Ronald Reagan looked like a one-term president, but in 1983 something changed....

Yuliya Zabyelina, "Between Immunity and Impunity: External Accountability of Political Elites for Transnational Crime" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

31 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How do top-level public officials take advantage of immunity from foreign jurisdiction afforded to them by international law? How does the immunity en...

Oliver Wunsch, "A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France" (Penn State UP, 2024)

31 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Eighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their c...

Matthew H. Hersch, "Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle" (MIT Press, 2023)

30 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Matthew Hersch challenges the existing narrative of the most significant hum...

Jamie Goodall, "Daring Exploits of Pirate Black Sam Bellamy: From Cape Cod to the Caribbean" (History Press, 2023)

28 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1717, the Council of Trade and Plantations received "agreeable news" from New England. "Bellamy with his ship and Company" had perished on the shoa...

David E. Sutton, "Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples" (Berghahn, 2021)

28 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What defines cooking as cooking, and why does cooking matter to the understanding of society, cultural change and everyday life? Bigger Fish to Fry: ...

Michael Ortiz, "Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism" (Bloombury, 2023)

27 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is fascism? Is it an anomaly in the history of modern Europe? Or its culmination? In Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism (Bloom...

Anita R. Gohdes, "Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence" (Oxford UP, 2023)

26 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Global adoption of the Internet has exploded, yet we are only beginning to understand the Internet's profound political consequences. Authoritarian st...

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640" (U Texas Press, 2024)

26 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a hist...

Maggie Hennefeld, "Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema" (Columbia UP, 2024)

25 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries w...

On Bloomsbury's "Object Lessons" Series: A Discussion with Christopher Schaberg

25 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Object Lessons is a series of concise, collectable, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Each book starts from a spe...

Emily Conroy-Krutz, "Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations" (Cornell UP, 2024)

24 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of re...

Anelise Hanson Shrout, "Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy" (NYU Press, 2024)

22 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Famine brought ruin to the Irish countryside in the nineteenth century. In response, people around the world and from myriad social, ethnic, and relig...

Patryk I. Labuda, "International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability" (Oxford UP, 2023)

22 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1990s, the promise of justice for atrocity crimes was associated with the revival of international criminal tribunals (ICTs). More recently, ho...

Heather Akou, "On the Job: A History of American Work Uniforms" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

21 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Through a variety of archival documents, artefacts, illustrations, and references to primary and secondary literature, On the Job: A History of Ameri...

Max Fraser, "Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class" (Princeton UP, 2023)

20 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated ...

Colin Elliott, "Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

19 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that s...

Rachel Gordan, "Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American" (Oxford UP, 2024)

18 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The period immediately following World War II was an era of dramatic transformation for Jews in America. At the start of the 1940s, President Roosevel...

Caitlin Davies, "Private Inquiries: The Secret History of Female Sleuths" (The History Press, 2023)

17 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Dismissed as ‘Mrs Sherlock Holmes’ or amateurish Miss Marples, mocked as private dicks or honey trappers, they have been investigating crime since...

Stephanie Chasin, "British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)

17 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new a...

Ada Maria Kuskowski, "Vernacular Law; Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

16 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Custom was fundamental to mediaeval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay cou...

Ruth A. Morgan, "Climate Change and International History: Climate Diplomacy in the Global North and South Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

16 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Exploring how climate change has configured the international arena since the 1950s, Climate Change and International History: Negotiating Science, G...

Nick Jones, "Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

15 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it...

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, "The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction" (MIT Press, 2024)

13 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Kalpavigyan—science fiction written to excite Bengali speakers about science, as well as to persuade them to evolve beyond the limitations of religi...

Rebecca Rego Barry, "The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells" (Post Hill Press, 2024)

12 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author (PostHill Press, 2024) by Rebecca Rego Barry is the first biography of...

Piotr Florczyk, "Swimming Pool" (Bloombury, 2024)

12 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This instalment of the Object Lessons series focuses on the Swimming Pool (Bloomsbury, 2024). The book explores the pool as a place where humans see...

Amy Paeth, "The American Poet Laureate" A History of U.S. Poetry and the State" (Columbia UP, 2023)

11 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The American Poet Laureate: A History of U.S. Poetry and the State (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Paeth shows how the state has been th...

Jad Adams, "Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

10 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives (Reaktion, 2023) by Jad Adams chronicles the vibrant and passionate women who wrote for the 1890s journal The Yell...

Jacqueline Kennelly, "Burnt by Democracy: Youth, Inequality, and the Erosion of Civic Life" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

09 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Burnt by Democracy: Youth, Inequality, and the Erosion of Civic Life (University of Toronto Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Kennelly traces the politi...

Hsuan L. Hsu, "Air Conditioning" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

08 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, menta...

Mike Duggan, "All Mapped Out: How Maps Shape Us" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

07 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Maps go far beyond just showing us where things are located. All Mapped Out: How Maps Shape Us (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mike Duggan is an exploration...

Joanna Crosby, "Apples and Orchards Since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

05 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Showing how the history of the apple goes far beyond the orchard and into the social, cultural and technological developments of Britain and the USA, ...

Diego Javier Luis, "The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History" (Harvard UP, 2024)

05 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain’s Asian and American colon...

Noah L. Nathan, "The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

03 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

States are often minimally present in the rural periphery. Yet a limited presence does not mean a limited impact. Isolated state actions in regions wh...

Jennifer Evans, "Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

02 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? In Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2023...

Christian R. Burset, "An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy" (Yale UP, 2023)

29 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. Christian R. Burset presents a compelling reexam...

Carol Beggy, "Pencil" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

28 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and t...

Obert Bernard Mlambo, "Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe: Veterans, Masculinity and War" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

27 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this highly original book Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe: Veterans, Masculinity and War (Bloomsbury, 2022), Dr. Obe...

Harry Turtledove, "Wages of Sin" (Caezik SF & Fantasy, 2024)

26 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What if HIV started spreading in the early 1500s rather than the late 1900s? Without modern medicine, anybody who catches HIV is going to die. In Wag...

Angela Wanhalla, "Of Love and War: Pacific Brides of World War II" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

25 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Between 1942 and 1945 more than two million servicemen occupied the southern Pacific theater, the majority of whom were Americans in service with the ...