Princeton UP Ideas Podcast
Episodes
Forrest Stuart, “Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy” (Princeton UP, 2020)
13 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How do young men use drill music and social media to gain power? In his new book, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online In...
Ayala Fader, “Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age” (Princeton UP, 2020)
05 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of life you had ever...
Yael Tamir, “Why Nationalism?” (Princeton UP, 2019)
04 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Around the world today, nationalism is back—and it’s often deeply troubling. Populist politicians exploit nationalism for authoritarian, chauvinis...
Ünver Rüstem, “Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul” (Princeton UP, 2019)
28 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Istanbul, there is a mosque on every hill. Cruising along the Bosphorus, either for pleasure, or like the majority of Istanbul’s denizens, for tr...
Abraham Newman and Henry Farrell, “Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security” (Princeton UP, 2019)
27 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We live in an interconnected world. People, goods, and services leap across borders like never before. Terrorist organizations, like al-Qaida, and dig...
Christopher Tomlins, “In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History” (Princeton UP, 2020)
20 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1831, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than t...
Wenfei Tong, “Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds” (Princeton UP, 2020)
17 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Wenfei Tong‘s Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds (Princeton University Press, 2020) looks at the extraordinary range of mating systems in the avian...
Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird, “Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior” (Princeton UP, 2020)
08 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In their new book, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior (Princeton University Press, 2020), political scientists Isma...
Paul Nahin, “Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons” (Princeton UP, 2020)
03 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons: From the Mathematics of Heat to the Development of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable (Princeton University Press, 2020...
Katharina Pistor, “The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality” (Princeton UP, 2019)
02 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“Most lawyers, most actors, most soldiers and sailors, most athletes, most doctors, and most diplomats feel a certain solidarity in the face of outs...
Margaret E. Roberts, “Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall” (Princeton UP, 2020)
31 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’...
David Estlund, “Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy” (Princeton UP, 2020)
28 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It is tempting to hold that any proposed principle of social justice is defective if it demands too much of people, given their proclivities. A stro...
Richard Pomfret, “The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century” (Princeton UP, 2019)
27 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Richard Pomfret’s The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2019) looks at the economies of the five form...
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
25 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Philli...
Robert H. Frank, “Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work” (Princeton UP, 2020)
17 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social i...
Juliane Hammer, “Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts Against Domestic Violence” (Princeton UP, 2019)
14 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How do Muslim Americans respond to domestic violence? What motivates Muslim individuals and organizations to work towards eradicating domestic violenc...
Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, “Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean” (Princeton UP, 2019)
03 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City. At ...
Christopher J. Phillips, “Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball” (Princeton UP, 2019)
29 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The so-called Sabermetrics revolution in baseball that began in the 1970s, popularized by the book—and later Hollywood film—Moneyball, was suppose...
Daniel Peris on Goetzmann’s “Money Changes Everything” (Princeton UP, 2016)
20 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Think that Wall Street has nothing to do with the real economy? You are probably not alone in that regard. But it turns out, you are wrong. As William...
Daniel Kennefick, “No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity” (Princeton UP, 2019)
17 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Kennefick talks about resistance to relativity theory in the early twentieth century and the huge challenges that faced British astronomers wh...
Yaacob Dweck, “Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas” (Princeton UP, 2019)
08 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the...
Joshua Specht, “Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America” (Princeton UP, 2019)
30 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Why do Americans eat so much beef? In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019), the h...
K. B. Berzock, “Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa” (Princeton UP, 2019)
23 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The companion publication to the 2019-2020 traveling exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Sahara...
David D. Hall, “The Puritans: A Transatlantic History” (Princeton UP, 2019)
19 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This book is a sweeping transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role...
Richard Whatmore, “Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution” (Princeton UP, 2019)
11 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of...
R. Muirhead and N. L. Rosenblum, “A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy” (Princeton UP, 2019)
09 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
From Pizzagate to Jeffrey Epstein, conspiracies seem to be more prominent than ever in American political discourse. What was once confined to the pag...
Amy Offner, “Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas” (Princeton UP, 2019)
22 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The neoliberal 1980s of austerity and privatization may appear as a break with the past—perhaps a model of government drawn up by libertarian econom...
Jonathan Rothwell, “A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society” (Princeton UP, 2019)
20 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Inequality in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the past decades — on that there is agreement. There is less agreement on the causes of that ...
Julian Havil, “Curves for the Mathematically Curious” (Princeton UP, 2019)
15 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Julian Havil about his latest book Curves for the Mathematically Curious: An Anthology of the Unpredictable, Historical, Beautiful, ...
Sara Lorenzini, “Global Development: A Cold War History” (Princeton UP, 2019)
07 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As Dr. Sara Lorenzini points out in her new book Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton University Press, 2019), the idea of economic devel...
David S. Richeson, “Tales of Impossibility” (Princeton UP, 2019)
30 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
David S. Richeson‘s book Tales of Impossibility: The 2000-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 20...
Nicholas Buccola, “The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America” (Princeton UP, 2019)
30 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Nicholas Buccola’s new book, The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton Universit...
Eric D. Weitz, “A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States” (Princeton UP, 2019)
15 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Who has the right to have rights? Motivated by Hannah Arendt’s famous reflections on the question of statelessness the book tells a non-linear globa...
Daniel Peris on Robert Shiller’s “Narrative Economics” (Princeton UP, 2019)
14 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Culture matters. And a key element of culture is storytelling. These maxims can be accepted as given, except in modern economics, where the mechanisti...
Erika Milam, “Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America” (Princeton UP, 2019)
04 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Erika Milam talks about the scientific search for human nature, a project that captured the attention of paleontologists, anthropologists, and primato...
Kyle A. Jaros, “China’s Urban Champions: The Politics of Spatial Development” (Princeton UP, 2019)
23 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Discussions of China’s 21st-century ‘rise’ often focus on the country’s dazzling megacities and the dizzying pace of urbanization which has pr...
Jennifer C. Lena, “Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts” ( Princeton UP, 2019)
29 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How did American elites change the meaning of Art? In Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts (Princeton University Press, 2019)...
Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, “Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean” (Princeton UP, 2019)
27 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (Princeton University Press, 2019), historia...
Evgeny Finkel, “Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust” (Princeton UP, 2017)
22 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Can there be a political science of the Holocaust? Evgeny Finkel, in his new book Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton U...
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, “Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America” (Princeton UP, 2017)
07 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1970s America, politicians began “getting tough” on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation’s penal system, discr...
Sarah L. Quinn, “American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation” (Princeton UP, 2019)
06 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities have gained widespread attention in recent years because of the 2008 financial crisis, b...
John Quiggin, “Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly” (Princeton UP, 2019)
29 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Trying to follow the key macroeconomic debates that are swirling around DC, CNBC, the WSJ and the NYT? If you are but don’t want to go back to gradu...
Melissa McCormick, “The Tale of Genji: A Visual Companion” (Princeton UP, 2018)
17 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums is the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. In The Tale of Genji. A Visual Co...
Nancy S. Steinhardt, “Chinese Architecture: A History” (Princeton UP, 2019)
16 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
If there’s one thing that conjures up the – rightly contested – idea of a ‘civilisation’, it is grand palatial or religious buildings, and m...
Joan Wallach Scott, “Sex and Secularism” (Princeton UP, 2017)
02 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Joan Wallach Scott’s contributions to the history of women and gender, and to feminist theory, will be familiar to listeners across multiple discipl...
Caitlyn Collins, “Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving” (Princeton UP, 2019)
28 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Where in the world do working moms have it best? In her new book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton Universit...
Mark Peterson, “The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power” (Princeton UP, 2019)
14 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for...
Francesca Trivellato, “The Promise and Peril of Credit” (Princeton UP, 2019)
07 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange...
Sarah Miller-Davenport, “Gateway State: Hawai’i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire” (Princeton UP, 2019)
21 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
One of my talking points when hanging out with my fellow diplomatic historians is the painful absence of scholarship on Hawaii. Too many political his...
Jack Wertheimer, “The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice Their Religion Today” (Princeton UP, 2018)
06 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Countless sociological studies and surveys present a rather bleak picture of religion and religious engagement in the United States. Attendance at wor...
Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “Islam in Pakistan: A History” (Princeton UP, 2018)
25 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a landmark publication in the fields of Religious Studies,...
Harold Holzer, “Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2019)
19 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Harold Holzer has written a biography of one of America’s greatest public artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Daniel Chester Fren...
Margaret C. Jacob, “The Secular Enlightenment” (Princeton UP, 2019)
16 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Secular Enlightenment by Professor Margaret C. Jacob, has been called a major new history on how the Enlightenment transformed people’s everyday...
Federico Varese, “Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories” (Princeton UP, 2011)
12 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Tonight we are talking with Federico Varese about his new book Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories (Princeton University ...
Michael Desch, “Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton UP, 2019)
05 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
To mobilize America’s intellectual resources to meet the security challenges of the post–9/11 world, US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates obser...
Sheilagh Ogilvie, “The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis” (Princeton UP, 2019)
20 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Guilds were prominent in medieval and early modern Europe, but their economic role has seldom been studied. In The European Guilds: An Economic Analys...
Michael C. Desch, “Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security” (Princeton UP, 2019)
19 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Many have read and debated “How Political Science became Irrelevant” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author of that piece is Michael C. ...
David Colander and Craig Freedman, “Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago’s Abandonment of Classical Liberalism” (Princeton UP, 2018)
11 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
If you are reading this, you have probably run into the “Chicago” model at some point or another, in terms of public policy, orthodox modern finan...
Adrienne Mayor, “Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology” (Princeton UP, 2018)
06 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by the MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, t...
Monica Kim, “The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History” (Princeton UP, 2019)
29 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Monica Kim provides a fresh look at the Korean War with a people-centered approach that studies the experiences of prisoners of war. As the first majo...
George R. Boyer, “The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain” (Princeton UP, 2019)
28 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generatio...
Volker Berghahn, “Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany” (Princeton UP, 2018)
18 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What can the lives of journalists under Hitler and Adenauer reveal? How did they navigate the Third Reich as “internal emigrants”? How did the eme...
Helena Rosenblatt, “The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century” (Princeton UP, 2018)
04 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How is it that “liberalism” is a word so ubiquitous and yet we can hardly seem to agree on its meaning? In her book The Lost History of Liberalism...
Michael Cotey Morgan, “The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War” (Princeton UP, 2018)
03 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Just when you thought that you knew everything and anything pertaining to the Cold War and the ending of it, along comes University of North Carolina ...
Hassan Malik, “Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution” (Princeton UP, 2018)
03 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Lumbering late Tsarist Russia and international finance? Is there anything there? The Bolsheviks and finance? How can there be anything there? I...
Seth Anziska, “Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo” (Princeton UP, 2018)
17 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The question of Palestinian autonomy has been a key element of Middle Eastern and Arab politics for much of the last century. A new history, by Seth A...
Victoria Smolkin, “A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism” (Princeton UP, 2018)
11 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The specter of the “Godless” Soviet Union haunted the United States and continental Western Europe throughout the Cold War, but what did atheism m...
Hüseyin Yılmaz, “Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought” (Princeton UP, 2018)
07 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Islamic intellectual history, it is generally assumed that the Ottomans did not contribute much to Islamic thought. With his new book, Caliphate R...
Rob Reich, “Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How it Can Do Better” (Princeton UP, 2018)
05 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How political are private foundations? Are they good or bad for democracy? Such are the big questions taken up by Rob Reich in his new book Just Givin...
Alireza Doostdar, “The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny” (Princeton UP, 2018)
05 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Scie...
John Sides, Michael Tesler, Lynn Vavreck, “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America” (Princeton UP, 2018)
03 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton University Press, 2018), co-authors John Sid...
Julie L. Rose, “Free Time” (Princeton UP, 2018)
26 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Though early American labor organizers agitated for the eight-hour workday on the grounds that they were entitled to “eight hours for work, eight ho...
Bryan Caplan, “The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money” (Princeton UP, 2018)
20 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Pretty much everyone knows that the American healthcare system is, well, very inefficient. We don’t, so critics say, get as much healthcare bang for...
Eric D. Weitz, “Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy” (Princeton UP, 2018)
20 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What can the Weimar Republic teach us about how democracies fail? How could the same vibrancy that gave us cultural touchstones spawn Nazism? In his n...
Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, “Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities” (Princeton UP, 2017)
02 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The vast chasm between classical economics and the humanities is widely known and accepted. They are profoundly different disciplines with little to s...
Michael G. Hanchard, “The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracies” (Princeton UP, 2018)
19 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Michael G. Hanchard’s new book The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracies (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a rich and...
Theodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity” (Princeton UP, 2018)
11 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origin...
Ann Taves, “Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths” (Princeton UP, 2016)
10 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
I’ve often asked myself this question: “How do religions begin?” I don’t know about you, but I think I would be very, very skeptical if someon...
Brian Stanley, “Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History” (Princeton UP, 2018)
03 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked with Brian Stanley, professor of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, about his new book, Christianity in the Twentieth C...
Nicholas Carnes, “The Cash Ceiling: Why Only the Rich Run for Office and What We Can Do About It” (Princeton UP, 2018)
28 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In 2018, much attention has been drawn to candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Randy Bryce: candidates for Congress who’ve made a living doi...
Michael Szonyi, “The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China” (Princeton UP, 2017)
13 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
At the heart of Michael Szonyi’s new book are two questions: 1) How did ordinary people in the Ming deal with their obligations to provide manpower ...
Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in A Godly Nation” (Princeton UP, 2016)
07 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation’s moral fabric, barred from holding public o...
Brian O’Connor, “Idleness: A Philosophical Essay” (Princeton UP, 2018)
31 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Culturally, idleness is widely derided as laziness, uselessness, and sloth. Even within philosophy, the idle are criticized for being wasteful, self...
Simon Levis Sullam, “The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy” (Princeton UP, 2018)
28 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Simon Levis Sullam, associate profess...
Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture” (Princeton UP, 2017)
09 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different h...
John O’Brien, “Keeping it Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys” (Princeton UP, 2017)
24 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What do the social worlds of teenage Muslim American boys look like? What issues do they grapple with and how do they think about issues that arise in...
Steven and Ben Nadler, “Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy” (Princeton UP, 2017)
23 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority ...
Konrad Jarausch, “Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century” (Princeton UP, 2018)
20 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), Konrad Jarausch, the Lurcy Prof...
Eli Maor, “Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg” (Princeton UP, 2018)
18 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us have heard of the math-music connection, but Eli Maor’s Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, ...
Sebastian Conrad, “What is Global History?” (Princeton UP, 2016)
11 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The last two decades have seen a surge in global histories, be they global histories of food, of ideas, or social movements. But why this move away ...
Elias Muhanna, “The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition” (Princeton UP, 2017)
02 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press...
Lily Geismer, “Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberalism and the Transformation of the Democratic Party” (Princeton UP, 2014)
19 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Stories about the suburbs often focus on conservatism. But, as Lily Geismer shows in her fascinating book, called Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberalis...
Hans-Lukas Kieser, “Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide” (Princeton UP, 2018)
19 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As a graduate student, I spent quite a bit of time explaining to people how we needed to pay much more attention to the history of World War One in th...
Duncan Pritchard, “Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing” (Princeton UP, 2015)
18 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How certain can you be that you’re actually sitting at your desk when it seems that you are? You might see your desk before you and feel it beneath ...
Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (Princeton UP, 2016)
14 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Researching and writing about infrastructure is a tall task. Infrastructure’s vastness, complexity, and, if it’s functioning, invisibility can def...
Jacob N. Shapiro, “Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict” (Princeton UP, 2018)
07 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Sha...
A. James McAdams, “Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party” (Princeton UP, 2017)
04 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Is there a difference between the Communist Party as an idea and the Communist Party in practice? A. James McAdams thinks so and takes the global appr...
Geoffrey Robinson, “The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-1966” (Princeton UP, 2018)
04 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
I first assigned Joshua Oppenheimer’s film “The Act of Killing” for my course in Comparative Genocide at Newman. The movie is a documentary ab...
Avidit Acharya et al., “Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics” (Princeton UP, 2018)
30 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Several weeks ago, we had Professor Lilliana Mason on the podcast talking about her book about the process of social sorting that has deepened divides...
Barry Wimpfheimer, “The Talmud: A Biography” (Princeton UP, 2018)
10 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In The Talmud: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2018), Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, associate professor of religious studies and law at Northwe...