New Books in History

Edward Blum interviews Holly White on her new book Constructing American Childhood: Age-Based Laws and the Illusion of Protection in the Early United States. As of 2025, in the United States an eleven-year-old child can be charged with a federal crime while in many states it's illegal to leave a twelve-year-old home alone. Twenty-six states allow children younger than sixteen to marry while the legal drinking age remains twenty-one. Are these age-based laws really protecting children, and if not, why do they exist? Holly White uncovers the answers to these questions through a history of America's first age-based laws. Analyzing trial records, newspapers, personal letters and diaries, as well as legal statutes from the founding era to the Civil War, White shows how restrictive age-based laws were implemented to benefit those who already held power. Over time, these new laws—coming out of child murder and rape trials as well as guardianship and underage marriage disputes—increasingly circumscribed the rights of young Americans in the early republic. As White shows, race, class, status, and gender influenced who came to benefit from the label of “child” in post-revolutionary America. In so doing, Constructing American Childhood explains why Americans continue to be guided by the age-based legal definitions of childhood and adulthood of our past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O'Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic leader, and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) based at the University of Adelaide, my guest explores how the logic of history, defined around trivalent logic (the “maybes,” the “ifs,” the ontological uncertainties), intersects with and challenges the logic of dominant AI algorithms. The book raises urgent questions about the changing status of human agency, the ethics of AI-powered data collection about us, and the de facto histories that AI is writing about us every second—histories that may decide whether we can travel, access education, or receive medical care. We talk about the opportunities that this perspective on AI presents to humans (and historians in particular!), how some non-Western conceptions of history—for instance, those of the Indigenous nations of Australia—complicate the dominant Western understanding of what history is, and the challenges we must address as we hand over more and more data and delegate the writing of actual human histories to AI. Aristotle makes a cameo, and my guest talks about how the economy might be shifting from knowledge bias to ethics bias. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The first large number of Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in the 1840s, and Chinese opera troupes were not far behind. In Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth Century California and Beyond (U Illinois Press, 2025), Nancy Yunhwa Rao writes the story of the flourishing and resiliency of Chinese opera in America. Chinese opera troupes brought with them an important cultural reminder of China that helped immigrants to build community and maintain connections with their old home in their new one. At the same time, anti-Chinese violence, legislation, and prejudice was a constant and growing threat to Chinese immigrants and Chinese theater. As Chinese theater became part of California and San Francisco culture, popular Chinese actors advocated for their art alongside appeals for civil rights. Rao draws on personal accounts and artifacts to place theater within the everyday lives of Chinese people. She also describes the costumes, singing, staging, and storytelling that impacted mainstream reception and influenced how Chinese communities saw themselves. Rao makes a convincing argument that more attention to the transpacific connections between the US and Asia is vital to telling the true story of America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today's generative AI.  With original research and clear explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what's known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today's technology. Starting with early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human speech, she demonstrates how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting instead for work-arounds that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Dr. Li reveals, transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access, circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and ever-growing amounts of new data. At its core, Divination Engines illuminates how the artifacts of human communication—speech, text, and images—have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today's algorithmic culture. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A joke is never just a joke—not even in the eighteenth century. In American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man's Democracy, 1750–1850 (JHU Press, 2025) Eran A. Zelnik offers a cultural history of early America that shows how humor among white men served to define and construct not only whiteness and masculinity but also American political culture and democracy more generally. Zelnik traces the emerging bonds of affinity that white male settlers in North America cultivated through their shared, transformative experience of mirth. This humor—a category that includes not only jokes but also play, riot, revelry, and mimicry—shaped the democratic and anti-elitist sensibilities of Americans. It also defined the borders of who could participate in politics, notably excluding those who were not white men. While this anti-authoritarian humor transformed the early United States into a country that abhorred elitism and class hierarchies, ultimately the story is one of democratization gone awry: this same humor allowed white men to draw the borders of the new nation exclusively around themselves. Zelnik analyzes several distinct forms of humor to make his case: tall tales, "Indian play," Black dialect, riot and revelry, revolutionary protests, and blackface minstrelsy. This provocative study seeks to understand the vexing, contradictory interplay among humor, democracy, and violence at the heart of American history and culture that continues today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In This Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation (Chelsea Green, 2026), discover Italy's unique ecological past and how it has shaped its present—and its future, with this riveting look at the incredibly diverse natural history and our need to preserve it. Italy is renowned for its antiquity, classical literature, philosophy, and modern-day culture, cuisine and fashion, but what has gone largely overlooked – and undocumented, even by its people – is its uniquely biodiverse landscape and wildlife. Italy has over 58,000 different species of wildlife, of which 4,777 are endemic, the highest in Europe. Italy provides a home for a third of all European flora and fauna, with a vast range of fruit and vegetable varieties: more grape varieties than France, more wheat than the US and more olives than Spain.  Edward Cutler, an art historian by trade, began to explore this history when, four years ago on his small Tuscan farm, he found a salamander that turned out to be endemic to that specific location. In understanding how Italy came together as a country, one of the youngest and still geologically active landscapes in the world, and made up of mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, glacial lakes, desert islands, caves and forests, Ed realised that this natural history has also had an incredibly important influence on its human history, especially its food culture and low-impact agriculture. And along the way, Ed discovers that Italy once was home to pygmy elephants, giant killer hedgehogs, and vampire-toothed deer. Today we can see the relics of those ancient creatures in the flashy blue lizard of Capri, gladiator crabs under the forum in Rome, the crested porcupine, the beautiful Apennine chamois and of course the Marzipan brown bear and Italian grey wolf, not forgetting its flora, including the world's rarest Christmas tree in Sicily. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Humans have always incorporated wildlife into processes of work, capture, and exchange. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, globalization became the latest in a long line of forces affecting human-animal relations. Grey parrots travelled the world as pets; rats used global shipping infrastructure to spread to far-off islands and became the object of cross-border extermination campaigns; and California sea otters were relocated to accommodate global oil transportation needs. The language of globalization, however, is rarely used to understand the history of these creatures. Globalizing Wildlife (UNC Press, 2026) shows how wild animals were not simply affected by globalization but shaped its concrete trajectories at local, national, and international scales. The editors and contributors of this collection bring the more-than-human turn to globalization studies, foregrounding not only how globalization matters for wildlife but also how wildlife matters for and constitutes globalization. The volume presents a range of geographically- and species-diverse case studies spanning from the 1870s to the present day to show that globalizing wildlife is far from a homogenous process. Ultimately, contributors reconceptualize globalization and wildlife in relation to one another and foster new connections between the longstanding study of globalization and the dynamic, rapidly consolidating field of historical animal studies. Contributors are Vincent Bijman, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Regina Horta Duarte, George Iordachescu, Nancy J. Jacobs, Ajit Menon, Gregg Mitman, Nitin D. Rai, Simone Schleper, Jules Skotnes-Brown, Monica Vasile, and James L. A. Webb Jr. Jacob Ward is an historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written on the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he's currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Much Matter in a Penny Paper: Early Yoruba Print Culture in Lagos,1910-1930 (Ohio UP, 2026) is a survey of the history and development of Yoruba print culture in Lagos, Nigeria, from the 19th to the early 20th century. The book details the emergence of the Yoruba language press, its themes, and its distinction from the English-language press. The influence of both missionary and secular presses on religion and morality as well as the socio-economic and political lives of the Nigerian people are also emphasised. The book relates the impact of the development of other machines, including transportation technologies like trains, trucks, and bicycles on the dissemination of printed materials across the regions. In terms of methodology, the book combines history and ethnography approaches to tell the story of the Yoruba printing culture in Lagos between 1910-1930. Alluding to Robert Campbell's installation of the first printing press in 1862, which led to the publication of the Anglo-African newspaper, the book narrates how the focus shifted from English-only publications to include Yoruba language content in the early 20th century, with books about Yoruba towns and poetry becoming popular. While the title of the book is rooted in the Yoruba proverb, “Oro po ninu iwe kobo”, reflecting the richness and diversity of content in early Yoruba newspapers, the book is testament to Professor Karin Barber's motivation entrenched in her fascination with Yoruba language creativity including oral praise poetry, popular theater, and verbal arts, and her discovery of Yoruba oriki in colonial-era publications.   Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam's greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ LinkedIn | ORCID | and Meta Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan's Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788–1860 (draws on considerable Australian legal, archival and statistical sources to ensure that we not only see the management of unfree labour regimes deployed in settler colonies, but also to identify all the strategies that victims of the early imperial prison-industrial complex used to resist the regime. The first half of Unfree Workers provides a brilliant account of the diversity of coercive labour practices that were demanded under colonial and settler-colonial expansions. Their labour regime was incredibly violent: A sentence to penal transportation was no trivial thing. The convicts sent to New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land were regimented, disciplined and accounted for in ways that pre-empted later social controls. They were also subjected to high levels of state sanctioned violence. The punishments and conditions of work they experienced continued to shape their lives long after they became free, impacting on colonial family formation and life expectancy. Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan show the material links between violence and colonial economic necessity. Unfree workers whose skills did not match those in demand were more likely to be accused of work refusal, which put them at risk of demotion to harder labour and increased violence. Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan's Unfree Workers, reminding us that while colonial capitalism is a system of exploitation, it necessarily depends upon class conflict. The process of transportation was a site for resistance. The convict ship, like the slave ship, was a factory that produced commodified labour for the colonies, ‘converting the idle poor into docile labourers.' Mutiny offered convicts the opportunity to steal their prison and use it for emancipatory means. Though many conspired, few succeeded, but on-ship radicalisation nevertheless prepared convicts for resistance on land. This included making deals for improved working conditions (including sometimes wages) in exchange for industrious and non-violent work. To this end, imprisoned workers came together in common cause, conducting strikes and go-slows and withholding effort. Just as Caribbean plantations were sites of frequent slave uprising, Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan show, so too were convict workers also legitimately feared for their capacity for violent rebellion, sometimes with potential support from settlers with wider political goals. Van Diemen's Land's extraordinary record-keeping—itself an instrument of the punitive surveillance characteristic of the prison-industrial complex—means that Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan have recounted in meticulous, often mapped, detail the size, activity and consequences of collective action among unfree workers.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Ancient Greek lives on in our culture in surprising ways. Sometimes funny - the word for an actor, hupokrites, gives us 'hypocrite'; sometimes beautiful - an astronaut is literally a sailor of the skies. And that's before we get to the myths which gave us our Achilles heel or our Midas Touch. And what about crocodile tears, which comes from the Greek's belief that crocodiles cried while eating their victims! Greek To Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World (Bloomsbury, 2026) is a learned but always entertaining journey through the world of the Ancient Greeks, their extraordinary language and how it has shaped our own understanding of the world today. After all, what is language but the frame through which we understand the world? Davie aims to bring more than just humour, he seeks to trace the thread of ancient Greek thought that runs through our own civilization, always with the lightness of touch and fascinating etymology. We meet Eros and Aphrodite, Alexander the Great and Oscar Wilde, the stoics, Epicurus and Sparta.While this is a book about language and the touching and illuminating presence of the ancient Greeks in our current words, it's also about how Ancient Greece shapes our culture today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

As Foreign Secretary in Neville Chamberlain's Cabinet in 1937, Eden didn't believe in appeasing the German and Italian dictatorships or the militaristic Japanese regime. Instead, he wanted to confront their aggression head on. Faced with growing Japanese assertiveness, including the launching of an undeclared war on China in July 1937, Eden appealed to the US for help. He believed sending an Anglo-American naval force to the Western Pacific would demonstrate that the democracies were not spineless, but were prepared to stand up for what they believed in. Was this a viable alternative to Chamberlain's appeasement policy, now notorious for its failure in the face of fascism? In Eden's Alternative to Appeasement: The Anglo-American Strategy that Might Have Been, 1937–38 (Tithebarn Press, 2026), historian Malcolm Murfett tells the story, using a wide range of primary sources from the UK and US archives, of Eden's push to persuade Roosevelt's administration to be more assertive in the Pacific. He reveals the diplomatic dance both sides engaged in, each unsure of the other's reliability, of their own ability to commit, and tied up in their own internal struggles for policy dominance. We get a real insight into how two once-and-future allies managed each other's expectations, as well as the wider strategic parameters within which they were operating. With eerie echoes of our own times, Murfett explores the challenges involved in both international diplomacy, and foreign and security policy. How standing up for principles and values can become compromised by the requirements of Realpolitik, and logistical constraints. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Whether recovering a lost history or charting a new land, scholars and explorers alike often hit at frontiers not only of place, but also knowledge. When the evidence only goes so far, what is the right way to advance? The answer is to make a conjecture: an educated guess that discourses on what is likely the case. Historical examples range from Italian humanists stealing manuscripts from monasteries and reconstructing classical languages, to Jesuit missionaries speculating about land bridges to the Americas, and even Renaissance magicians pioneering in alchemy and astrology. This collective practice is called “conjectural history,” and its roots go far back. But how far back? To answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest, Professor Anthony Grafton. A former president of the American Historical Association, and the Emeritus Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, Grafton is a scholar of early modern Europe and written history, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, and the author of many books such as The Footnote (1997) and Magus (2023). Today, we will discuss his current project on “conjectural history.” We discuss the use of conjectural versus counterfactual history, its founders in Herodotus and Thucydides, and proponents like the explorer Jose de Acosta, S.J. and the scholar Lorenzo Valla. Also discussed are Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the birth of modern science from renaissance magic, C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image, recent scholarship on premodern eyewitness testimony to the supernatural, the magician Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and the best lost spots of Princeton University. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison's Notes is the podcast of Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison's Footnotes. Chapter Headings: 00:00 | Introduction & What is Conjectural History 4:30 | The Scottish Enlightenment vs. the Renaissance Tradition 11:42 | Conjectural History & a Case Study: Jose de Acosta 19:30 | Theology, Science & The Renaissance 26:19 | Lorenzo Valla and the Donation of Constantine 38:19 | Conjecture, Divination, and Magic Closing | Reflections: History, Belief, and Closing Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Fulvia was born into wealth, privilege, and prestige around the year 80 BCE, yet there was nothing inherently special about her—she was not a saint, an empress, or a queen. But during the years leading up to the fall of the Roman Republic, Fulvia was moving in the most powerful social circles, and by her death in 40 BCE she had amassed a degree of political and military power unprecedented for a woman. Fulvia's success came at considerable cost, however. None of her three marriages to politically powerful men—most famously to Marc Antony—lasted, and three of her five children died violently. She was repeatedly ridiculed for daring to step outside the confines of the domestic sphere. The deliberate and systematic destruction of her reputation shaped her legacy for two millennia.Ample literary, documentary, and archaeological sources for Fulvia exist, yet most contemporary depictions of her were extremely negative. In Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome (Yale UP, 2025) historian Jane Draycott, reading between the lines of the ancient evidence, proposes a more nuanced interpretation. Using Fulvia as a guide, she invites readers to visit an unfamiliar Rome, one in which women played a crucial role during Rome's violent transition from a republic to the dictatorship of the Roman Empire. Jane Draycott is a historian and archaeologist, and the author of Cleopatra's Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the university's Games and Gaming Lab. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown. Yet Hobsbawm was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was embedded in an extraordinary web of politicians, activists, and fellow intellectuals across Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including Manmohan Singh, Che Guevara, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernand Braudel, E. P. Thompson, Arno Mayer, and Salvador Allende.  In The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (Harvard University Press, 2026), Emile Chabal traces the origins of Hobsbawm's ideas and most famous writings by exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his pathbreaking work. Going well beyond the Ages series of modern history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm's entire body of writing. Indeed, The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates globally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely.In When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America's Black Botanical Legacy (Henry Holt & Co.), award-winning plant biologist Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery explores the ways seven trees—as well as the cotton shrub—are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants.Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer. Beronda L. Montgomery, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and scholar who pursues a common theme of understanding how individuals perceive, respond to, and are impacted by the environments in which they exist. Her primary laboratory-based research has been focused on the responses of photosynthetic organisms (i.e., plants and cyanobacteria) to external light cues. Additionally, Beronda pursues this theme in the context of effective mentoring and leadership of individuals, and the role of innovative leaders in supporting success. You can find her at her website. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Do you look back at your sex ed classes and wonder WTF?! Are you a parent looking at your kid's curriculum and asking the same question? Sex Education 101: Approachable Essays on Folklore, Culture, & History (Fox Folk Press, 2023) is less of a how-to of sex education and more of a why. Why does abstinence-only sex ed receive so much federal funding? Why do instructors show gross images of STIs to scare students? The answers, believe it or not, have a lot to do with folklore. Folklore—informally transmitted traditional culture—has a lot to say about sex. And it is often people's first point of contact with information and messages about sex. Folklore encompasses urban legends, moral panics, and rumors, which influenced early U.S. policies around sex, and also includes jokes, raunchy folk songs, and beliefs and slang about menstruation or STIs. And thus, folklore shapes sex ed classrooms and school sex ed policies. Jeana Jorgensen earned her PhD in folklore at Indiana University. She is a lecturer in anthropology at Butler University and part of the editorial team at Marvel's & Tales. Her books include Folklore 101 (2021), Fairy Tales 101 (2022), and Sex Education 101 (2023), and her work has appeared in the Journal of American Folklore, Fabula, Journal of Folklore Research, and elsewhere. Rachel Hopkin PhD is a folklorist and audio producer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Newport Gardner's Anthem: A Story of Slavery, Struggle, and Survival in Early America (Cornell UP, 2025) explores the remarkable life of Occramer Marycoo, an enslaved African who went on to become one of early America's most important Black leaders.  In the mid-eighteenth century, Marycoo was taken from West Africa to Newport, Rhode Island, where he was forced into racial bondage and given a name that symbolized the power that his new city and new enslaver held over him: Newport Gardner. In this powerful book, Edward E. Andrews pieces together newspaper articles, church records, letters, and Gardner's own writings to tell the story of his life. After acquiring his freedom via a winning lottery ticket in 1791, Gardner became a kind of Founding Father for Newport's free Black community. He established and led several Black benevolent organizations that helped the community navigate the complicated waters of freedom as Rhode Island slowly began the process of emancipation. He became a popular educator to young Black Newporters, and also emerged as a key religious figure, serving as a long-standing pillar of Newport's First Congregational Church and later founding an independent Black church in the 1820s. His final act was leading a group of about three dozen Black New Englanders to Liberia, in hopes that a new start in Africa would be better than the discrimination they faced in America. A richly textured account, Newport Gardner's Anthem tells the story of a forgotten Black leader while exploring the new, but tragically limited, opportunities for formerly enslaved people in the post-Revolutionary world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941 (Cornell UP, 2025.) illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists, who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil. As Jews comfortable in the Polish language and within Polish artistic and academic society, they saw themselves as intermediaries between less-integrated Jews and the Polish cultural elite. At the turn of the century, Jewish ethnographers and museum creators staked their claim to belonging to the civic nation though the display of Jewish folk art, fine art, and Judaica. After the First World War, the nearly three million Jews in the Second Polish Republic were suddenly challenged with finding a place for themselves in a state that increasingly defined itself as a creation of the ethnic Polish nation, to which Jews, by many accounts, did not belong. By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers a better understanding of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. This is not a case of assimilation, nor of acculturation, but rather of displaying a parallel culture that was at once similar and yet distinctive. Displays of Belonging offers a nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of ways in which Jews in Poland saw their present and dreamed of their future. It places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context, and sheds light on ways in which ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in the space of museums.  Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. Book here Faculty page here Email & Social Media: plerner@usc.edu @plerner.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what springs to mind are not just lofty concepts but also material realities: cramped dorm rooms and musty library stacks, gothic towers and freshly mowed quads. The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood (Harvard University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at the center of the institution's 900-year history. Constructing each chapter around an emblematic material—straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk, paper, iron, and concrete—Professor William Whyte traces the intimate connections between the university's shifting physical form and its evolving social and cultural meanings. From the medieval University of Paris, where students purchased bundles of straw to use as chairs in otherwise-unfurnished classrooms, to the ocean of concrete at postcolonial Nigeria's Obafemi Awolowo University, Professor Whyte shows how competing visions of higher learning left their imprint on generations of university architecture, landscaping, and furniture. Along the way, he highlights perennial fears that, within the social space of the university, the life of the mind would recede before worldly interests: that student bloodlines would be tainted by racial intermixing, that courting donors with buildings named in their honor would become more important than research and education, that the allure of powdered wigs and silk gowns would undermine scholarly discipline. A richly textured chronicle, The University concludes that, even in the age of remote learning, the college campus is irreplaceable. The future of higher education includes fiber-optic cables, but stone, brick, and steel are here to stay. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

St. Vincent's Hospital began with a simple, but radical mission: to care for all those in need regardless of race, creed, or financial means. For more than 160 years, the hospital carried out that work, serving notables and the nameless alike, from impoverished immigrants and those stricken by devastating nineteenth-century epidemics to AIDS patients and the victims of the attacks of 9/11. A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent's Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City (NYU Press, 2026) provides the first comprehensive history of this remarkable institution, from its humble beginnings in 1849 to its abrupt closure in 2010. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, St. Vincent's earned distinction not only for the quality of its medical programs, but also for its unwavering dedication to the poor. The hospital was a testament to the vision and labor of the Sisters of Charity, who founded, staffed, and administered the hospital with remarkable skill and devotion. This captivating account documents St. Vincent's growth into one of the largest and most prominent Catholic medical centers in the United States, as well as its struggles to sustain its religious mission within the ever-changing and increasingly competitive medical marketplace. A Monument to Charity highlights the immense contributions of Catholic sisters to health care in the United States as well as the enduring legacy of all those who worked alongside them to care for the sick and alleviate suffering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Edward Blum interviews David N. Gellman on his book Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York (Cornell UP, 2022). In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic.Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice.John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles. The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A sweeping history of humanity's most fundamental creation―the home―and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves. Americans spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds of that time spent in their homes. Globally, the construction and maintenance of residential buildings account for a staggering portion of carbon emissions. In this timely and fascinating work, architect and urban-planning scholar Stefan Al deftly weaves together archaeology, engineering, social history, and environmental science to explain how our homes have developed through the ages and in turn shaped civilization and the planet itself. From tiny pit-houses in the Levant and Mesoamerica thousands of years ago to soaring skyscrapers in Dubai, New York, and Shanghai today, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) takes readers on a swift and absorbing tour of the evolution of human habitation. Whisking readers from ancient Pompeii to contemporary Hong Kong, industrial-age Liverpool to postwar Levittown, Al shows how our choices in housing have both reflected and affected ideas about gender roles, privacy, and comfort. Discover how seemingly mundane elements―like door-knockers and corridors―have altered everyday interactions, and how material choices have remade the planet's surface. He also confronts the darker side of domesticity, exposing the unintended consequences of our architectural choices across millennia, including smoke-filled Neolithic dwellings, deadly fires in crowded Roman apartment buildings, and worsening social isolation in car-dependent suburbs. Finally, he examines the myths and reality of future housing, including 3D-printed homes and space architecture built by robots. Drawing from personal experiences across global cities and professional insights, Al illuminates how our choices in housing continue to influence everything from social relationships to climate change, ultimately arguing that understanding this rich history is crucial for building a more sustainable future. With billions more people needing housing in the coming decades, Dwelling on Earth reveals how we might transform humanity's defining challenge into our greatest opportunity. HOST BIO: Alex Hallbom is an urban planner and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Yana Skorobogatov about her book, Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union (University of Chicago Press, 2026). From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly 40,000 citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands introduces readers to the many citizens in this period—women and men of all ages and backgrounds—who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness. Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. The book is a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the mid-19th century, anyone who was anyone in the American West had heard of the Ute leader Wakara. Yet, by the early twenty first century, his story has been, if not forgotten, at the very least twisted and distorted into something that would have been unrecognizable to him and his contemporaries. In Wakara's America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books, 2025), University of Nebraska religious studies professor Max Perry Mueller not only sets the record straight on Wakara, his life, and his times, but also explains how and why his narrative grew to be so misused. It's a story of public history gone wrong, of grave robbing and NAGPRA, and above all about the complexities and contingencies of history. Mueller makes a convincing case that our understanding of Utah and the broader West has been incomplete without Wakara near the center of the story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

We know Abraham Lincoln as the eloquent, compassionate leader of a nation torn by civil war. But he had another, less visible side, equally central to his character and leadership: Lincoln was a master of party politics. Schooled as a Whig in the rough-and-tumble of Illinois electioneering in the 1830s, Lincoln skillfully navigated treacherous partisan crosscurrents and helped build the Republican party into a viable force. His decades of experience as a party leader proved invaluable to him as president and commander in chief during the Civil War. Matthew Pinsker's groundbreaking Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln (W.W. Norton & Company, 2026) draws extensively on Lincoln's private correspondence to move beyond the marble icon and realize a flesh-and-blood character in Boss Lincoln. Behind closed doors he was shrewd and insistent, capable of deft manipulation, blunt intimidation, or thoughtful argument as needed. As a decision-maker he was attentive to detail but kept his own counsel and trusted his own acumen. His aides noted that in cabinet meetings Lincoln had the final say, and “there is no cavil.” Devoted to elections, he kept careful, handwritten tallies of party turnout, even gifting one to Mary Todd, another partisan, during their courtship. His hymn to democracy at Gettysburg in 1863 carried a partisan message to the political leaders gathered there: The fight for the union would take place at the polls as well as on the battlefield. Boss Lincoln often sacrificed candor for purpose. He used his White House meeting with Frederick Douglass in 1864, ostensibly about emancipation, to send a message to radicals about his need for their support. With emancipation and the war's outcome at stake, facing withering criticism from all sides, Lincoln won reelection by building a new political coalition through the Union party. Here was Boss Lincoln at his height, captured in absorbing detail in this indelible portrait of our greatest president. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished. Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) brings together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their contributions to the making of America be fully recognized. Blair L.M. Kelley, Ph.D. is a renowned author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. She is the seventh president of the National Humanities Center, the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Blair previously held senior leadership roles at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of the American South and at North Carolina State University where she served as Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Affairs and Partnerships and the Alumni Graduate Professor of History. You can find her on all social platforms @profblmkelley. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Dr. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel's Seeking Freedom in Indian Country: Slavery, Sovereignty, and Resistance within the Five Tribes, 1790–1861 (LSU Press, 2026) is the first comprehensive study of African chattel slavery within the Five Tribes: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations. Dr. Oertel examines how chattel slavery functioned among all Five Tribes before and during the removal process, how the tribes reconstituted slavery post-removal in Indian Territory, and how enslaved Black people promoted freedom-seeking strategies at each stage. Furthermore, her work considers how the conflict over slavery in Indian Territory contributed to the larger national debate over slavery's fate on the eve of the Civil War. Historians have examined how the practice of African enslavement emerged within one or two tribes, how forced migration affected slavery within particular nations, and how the debate over slavery divided multiple Indigenous nations. Dr. Oertel, however, is the first to examine Indian Territory as a whole, its significance to the sectional debates, and its role as an incubator of emancipation policies in the United States. Knitting together these individual tribal narratives and supplementing them with extensive primary research on how slavery functioned across Indian Territory, she integrates Indian country into the antebellum march toward the Civil War. Seeking Freedom in Indian Country joins a rising chorus of studies that integrate southern and western history, which, by default, also pulls together the history of the so-called Indian Wars with the Civil War. Dr. Oertel suggests that we cannot fully understand the causes of the Civil War without also considering the changes brought about by the forced removal of Indians. She argues that settler colonialism and the expansion of African chattel slavery together set the stage for sectional conflict to explode in the West. Ironically, both Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism and Black resistance to slavery challenged white supremacy in ways that foretold the end of slavery but also furthered the settler colonial project. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Amy Weitzman interviews Emily Sneff on her new book When the Declaration of Independence Was News and the graduate school experience. In 1776 people could hear the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in public squares and could read it in the pages of their local newspapers. Stories of the Declaration typically recount the work that took place inside the Continental Congress, focusing on the men tasked with drafting the text. Although Congress declared independence, the work of spreading the news involved printers, post riders, ship captains, civic leaders, soldiers, clerks, orators, preachers, diplomats, and translators. When the Declaration of Independence Was News reveals the stories behind how the Declaration was communicated in the United States and around the Atlantic. Tracing the travels of the founding document of the United States from Philadelphia to New York, Boston, Charleston, London, Leiden, Paris, and beyond, Emily Sneff shows how people both celebrated the Declaration and critiqued it. In the weeks after the document was penned, it was printed in the columns of newspapers, translated into German and French, and shared with Native American allies. The document induced some people to make public their privately held beliefs about whether they wanted the United States to be independent or to reconcile with King George III. The Declaration was met with unique circumstances everywhere it went, and people modified the text along the way. The questions of who experienced the news of independence, when, and how reveal an expansive and complex history of a critical moment in the American Revolution. Published for the 250th anniversary of American independence, When the Declaration of Independence Was News returns to a time before the legacy of these words and the outcome of the war against Great Britain were known to reconsider what the founding of the United States meant to the people who were living through it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Some of the earliest canals in colonial America, referred to as the Inner Passage, were constructed by enslaved people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 1700s. In a paradox of history, for over a hundred years enslaved Black people used these canals, constructed for white plantation owners, to travel southward to freedom in Spanish Florida. In The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway (MIT Press, 2026), Virginia McGee Richards documents the lost narrative of the Inner Passage through 60 extraordinary photographs of landscapes altered by slavery and portraits of Lowcountry descendants, along with an essay describing her discovery of this untold history. In an accompanying essay, Imani Perry writes about her own journey on the Inner Passage, putting Black resistance to enslavement and Southern history into an immediate context. James Estrin brings decades of insight about photography and the power of visual storytelling to his affecting foreword. Together, these words and images offer a powerful living map of history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks (Beacon Press, 2026), historian Dr. Vaneesa Cook examines the history of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty in order to consider, more broadly, the United States' relationship with liberty and empire. Empire and liberty have been part of the American story since the founding, but they are often at odds, sometimes irreconcilably so. Cook examines their changing relationship and meaning using these two iconic buildings as anchors. She also examines the symbolism and importance of the landmarks themselves. She considers how individuals and groups who have had more limited access to liberty have tried to shape the meaning of the symbols and their own rights at the same time. In telling this sweeping history, Cook touches in themes of American identity and ideals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The history of sports in Turkey is deeply contested. Over the decades, journalists, pundits, non-professional historians, sports scholars, and everyday people have offered competing narratives about the origins of modern sports in the late Ottoman Empire.  In The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas Press, 2026), Murat Cihan Yıldız tells the story of how Istanbul's Muslims, Christians, and Jews—gymnastics teachers, football coaches, weightlifters, journalists, athletes, and fans—created a gendered and class-stratified civic project that promoted athletics as a source of fun, beauty, and moral education. Influenced by the emerging global vogue for organized sports, all boys from the expanding middle class of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial capital were expected to exercise and compete on the playing field in order to develop into moral men. Yet even as the embrace of modern athletics transcended ethnoreligious divisions, it did not erase them. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Yıldız shows that sportsmen created new communal boundaries in team affiliations, fandom, and sports media. Adeptly reconstructing Istanbul's imperial culture as it was experienced more than a century ago, The Ottoman World of Sports recovers a lived imperial culture whose defining features were shaped by its multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual sportsmen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Parallel Journeys: Eurasian History through Travelers' Eyes (Cambria Press, 2026) is a comparative history of Eurasia told through travel writing and cross-cultural encounters. In this anthology, Anthony Barbieri pairs accounts from twenty-eight travelers across different historical periods, placing side-by-side travelers looking or going East with those looking or going West. Spanning from 400 BCE through to 1936, the anthology brings together ambassadors, monks, missionaries, merchants, and journalists in order to explore how people understood the cultures, societies, and worlds that they encountered through travel. Structured around these “parallel journeys,” the book highlights both similarities and differences in the ways travelers described foreign places and peoples. Some travelers used these encounters to criticize the societies they entered, while others turned outward observation into reflection on their own cultures. Across the anthology, travel writing emerges not simply as a way of describing a journey, but as a way of forging ideas about cultural difference, identity, religion, commerce, and political power. This anthology will appeal to readers interested in Eurasian history, travel writing, world literature, and cross-cultural exchange. It is also a flexible and engaging anthology perfect for classroom teaching, complete with both long and short versions of each account, helpful visuals, and contextual information — an excellent way to get students thinking about what it means to do comparison effectively. For another overview of the anthology, readers should check out Barbieri's lecture “Beyond the Mountains and Seas,” available on YouTube here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today I'm speaking with Steven K. Green, Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and Affiliated Professor of History and Religious Studies at Willamette University. We are discussing his book, American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2026). Since the first permanent Protestant settlement in Jamestown in 1607, Protestant Christianity has waxed and waned through a series of revivals, migrations, and challenges from alternative faiths like Catholicism and Mormonism. The Gilded Age, from roughly 1870 to 1900, was a unique period for Protestantism in American history. Most Americans still subscribed to a Protestant faith, though threats began to arise not from other confessions, but rather from philosophical and scientific challengers. The so-called freethinkers represented a broad range of beliefs and ideas, being united by a mutual skepticism of religious conservatism and traditional sexual and gender mores. American Infidelity tells the story of this tug-of-war for the soul of a nation, with Christianity on one side and the legacy of thinkers like Thomas Paine on the other. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Anna Lively is a historian of modern Ireland, Britain, and Russia. Awarded her PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh in 2022, she is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of Strathclyde. Prior to this she held the Roy Foster Irish Government Research Fellowship in the History and Culture of Ireland at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and was a Teaching Fellow in Modern History at the University of Aberdeen. She has published in multiple journals on the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and on the Irish Save the Children Fund. From the late nineteenth century, Ireland featured prominently in Russian liberal, conservative, and radical debates about land politics, self-determination, and empire. Equally, Irish commentators from across the political spectrum used Russia as a lens onto questions of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. But while the Irish and Russian revolutionary contexts are well-studied in isolation, their myriad political, social, and cultural entanglements are not.Drawing on extensive Russian and Irish archival accounts, newspapers, diaries, letters, memoirs, literary, and visual sources, Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923 (Oxford UP, 2026) looks in both directions at Irish responses to Russian revolutionary change and at representations of Ireland in Russian-language texts from the 1905 Russian Revolution to the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. The result is a unique account of international engagement in revolutionary Russia and Ireland and of how Ireland was imagined beyond the Anglophone world. This mutual, if selective and conditional, engagement reflected wider technological changes in news communication and the expansion of international news agencies. Diasporic networks, including in Britain and the US, helped to shape Russo-Irish relations and Irish publications and political actors engaged with different parts of the Russian empire, including Ukraine, Finland, and Poland.Through five thematic chapters, the book considers Russo-Irish relations from contrasting and often overlooked angles, including Irish eyewitness experiences on the Eastern front during World War One and religious perspectives. Using a transnational methodology and expansive source base, the book offers a fresh angle on the entangled history of revolutions in the early twentieth century and the translation of news and ideas across borders. Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905–1923 will be published in September 2026 with Oxford University Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London (Yale UP, 2026) uncovers the complex and often unexpected connections between eighteenth-century London's sites of punishment and its spaces of art-making, instruction, and display. Drawing together a wide range of images, objects, and texts – from popular woodcuts and anatomical sculptures to moral tracts and dictionaries of slang – it offers new readings of works by major artists, such as William Hogarth, Johan Zoffany, and Joseph Wright of Derby, and shines a light on others that traditional accounts of the period have overlooked or ignored. In doing so, this book shows how state violence shaped the art and visual culture of this era, whose legacies persist to this day. Kelsey Brosnan is an art historian specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. Her book on the still-life painter Anne Vallayer-Coster was published by Lund Humphries and Getty Publications in 2026. kb2348@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Although the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, European slavery in America began more than a century before. In a work distinguished not only by its original research but by its “passionate prose” (James F. Brooks), historian Linford Fisher demonstrates how the enslavement of Indigenous people began in the years just after 1492, ensnaring an estimated three to six million Natives throughout the Americas. Although largely erased from the public consciousness, Native enslavement continued for centuries to become a colossal phenomenon that affected nearly 600,000 Native Americans in North America alone, revealing the shocking truth that American colonizers enslaved Natives in roughly the same numbers as they imported enslaved Africans.From Virginia to California, from New England to Barbados, Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History (Liveright, 2026) traces the history of Indigenous enslavement and land dispossession, detailing how colonizers captured Natives and often deliberately mislabeled them as Black slaves to avoid detection. While the American Revolution pealed the bells of freedom for colonists, it paved a larcenous trail of westward expansion that subsequently plundered Indigenous land and stole the labor of Natives from nations like the Cherokee, Navajo, Nisean, and many others. “This double theft,” Fisher writes, “was central to the origins, growth, and eventual success of the English colonies and the United States—not just initially but throughout all of American history.”In this expansive narrative, Fisher weaves together accounts of major episodes in American history including early colonization, the American Revolution, and the Civil War with lesser-known stories of Native enslavement and land loss. Fisher upends conventional histories about the nature of American slavery, revealing enslaved Natives in places we have overlooked, including southern antebellum plantations and the nineteenth-century American West. After Congress outlawed Native slavery in 1867, Americans forced Indigenous children into boarding schools and white homes, where they labored under forced assimilation. This practice was not reformed until the latter twentieth century, when Native nations finally secured increasing rights and self-determination.Nearly fifteen years in the making, this magisterial volume not only uncovers a five-century genocidal history but also illuminates the myriad ways Native Americans have fought for their sovereignty and maintained community. The most comprehensive work of its kind, Stealing America emerges as a saga of both persistent colonialism and Indigenous resilience, one that reframes American history at its core. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The rise of “heritage” foods—that is, the reinvention of traditional foods—has enjoyed a high profile thanks to the oft-praised efforts of chefs such as Sean Brock and René Redzepi. But Lily Kelting observes the popularity of heritage foods as something more: a global movement in response to climate catastrophe and the rise of right-wing, populist movements that center a return to the past as part of their ideology. Weaving ethnography, discourse analysis, critical theory, and sensory, embodied critique, Kelting tracks and critiques the boom of traditional food revival movements in the American South, Denmark, and India. Ultimately, Kelting argues that the heritage culinary professionals wish to revive is equal parts nostalgia and invention: They engage, subvert, and ignore food histories in their creation of new food movements. As Kelting documents our contemporary moment, she shows how the conversations surrounding these new food movements leave out people already keeping their traditions alive. Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), then, serves as a reparative revaluation of the work of the cooks largely excluded from the contemporary media conversation about heritage revival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

What happens when performance defies social and political boundaries? Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2026) offers a new cultural history of non-elite spectacle in Heian Japan (794–1185), uncovering how performances on the margins—boisterous dengaku music and dance, daring sangaku acrobatics, and the infectious lyrics of imayō songs—challenged and fascinated the aristocracy. Ashton Lazarus reveals how these unruly arts were documented by the very elites they unsettled, appearing in historical chronicles, diaries, prose, poetry, and illustrated scrolls. More than mere precursors to later forms like noh and kyōgen, these performances formed a dynamic cultural force with real political impact. By tracing their influence through literary studies, performance studies, and historiography, Lazarus rethinks the interplay between politics, class, and culture in Heian Japan. Performing Transgression illuminates how acts of defiance and creative expression resonate across time, offering fresh insights into the ways performance bridges the vanished past and the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In his final days in office in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt invited dozens of friends to the White House for lunch. They had never met as a group, but they had one thing in common: Each played tennis with the president and advised on policy matters. Roosevelt half-joked that the public would never know how much these tennis partners did to make his administration a success. Journalists dismissively called them the “Tennis Cabinet,” making light of their contribution, but Roosevelt knew otherwise. In Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Court Cabinet (Potomac Books, an Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2026), Michael Patrick Cullinane explains that the inner circle led the administration's campaigns against corporate greed, investigated public health violations, and formulated consumer protections. They founded environmental conservation policies, prosecuted civil rights violations, and implemented bureaucratic efficiencies that saved the government billions. Roosevelt's tennis mates shaped the nation's diplomacy, ending wars and promoting American interests abroad. Never had a more eclectic group advised a U.S. president. The Tennis Cabinet included legendary frontier lawman Seth Bullock and the starched-shirt corporate lawyer Henry Stimson, who served in five presidential administrations. Texas wolf wrangler Jack Abernathy played with stuffy bureaucrats like Labor Commissioner Charles Patrick Neill and social activist James Bronson Reynolds. The French ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand spun yarns with football hero George Washington Woodruff and Roosevelt's college friend and banker Robert Bacon. James Garfield, namesake son of a martyred president, sipped mint juleps with Supreme Court Justice William Henry Moody. And J. P. Morgan's silver-spooned son-in-law Herbert Satterlee kept company with rugged soldier Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly. For all their differences, these men shared a desire to help the president transform the nation from a parochial nineteenth-century republic into an imperial and industrial global power. They have escaped the attention of reporters and historians only because of Roosevelt's towering celebrity. Turning away from Roosevelt as the singular force behind his administration, it is possible to see how the contributions of his Tennis Cabinet quietly sowed the seeds of the American Century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1905, when Broadway was already the most famous thoroughfare in New York City, a recreational photographer from Newark, New Jersey named Charles Gilbert Hine set out to document the street's entire length. Taking pictures from downtown Bowling Green and its skyscrapers to uptown Inwood with its fields and wildflowers, Hine depicted a Broadway animated by the presence of the past and the relentless pressures of change. Through his lens appear shanties, brownstones and country houses; horse-drawn wagons and trolley cars; downtown sex workers and uptown famers. Hines' photographs lingered in the collection of the New York Historical until they were discovered by Nick Yablon, a professor of history and American Studies at the University of Iowa. Now they appear in Nick's new book, From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: C.G. Hine's 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway (Columbia University Press, 2026). Combining Hines' photographs with his own analysis, along with maps and other images, Nick has produced an illuminating book that depicts Broadway, its peoples, its buildings, and the many neighborhoods that Broadway traverses, at a distinct moment in time. A digital companion to From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower, with a selection of Hine's photographs, an interactive map of Broadway, and more, can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Sentient Seas: Archaeologies of Seascapes and Maritime Rituals (UP Florida, 2026), published by University Press of Florida (2026), offers a global perspective on maritime cultures, examining how societies across time and space have understood and interacted with the sea. Synthesizing archaeological evidence, historical documents, and ethnographic accounts, Ian McNiven explores maritime traditions from ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mediterranean to medieval Europe and Scandinavia to contemporary Indigenous communities in the South Pacific. McNiven investigates diverse cultural practices including shipbuilding, the treatment of shipwrecks and shipwreck victims, and maritime resource use, interpreting the evidence through the perspectives of mariners who understood the seas to be sentient and capable of acting with intentionality. He introduces the concepts of “terrestrial seascapes” and “ontological switching” to illustrate how land-based shrines and votive offerings extend maritime cosmologies and maintain a liminal transition from land to sea. By bridging anthropological and archaeological research with transdisciplinary blue humanities scholarship, Sentient Seas approaches seas as spiritscapes, recontextualizing folkloric beliefs about maritime superstitions. Ian J. McNiven is Research Professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator with the Australian research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Kelly M. Duke Bryant's Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940 (U Mass Press, 2026)explores how colonial child protection policies and African children's responses to them produced new ways of defining, measuring, documenting, and experiencing childhood in the French colony of Senegal from 1848 to 1940. In this groundbreaking book, Bryant takes the scholarship in new directions, offering to a literature dominated by studies of British colonies in the twentieth century a study of childhood in a French colony from the immediate post-emancipation period through the 1930s. This focus allows her to complicate the generally accepted timeline of child protection in colonial Africa and question other assumptions about children's history on the continent. The author, Kelly M. Duke Bryant, is an Associate Professor of History at Rowan University and the current President of the French Colonial Historical Society. The host, Elisa Prosperetti, is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore. She is the author of An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history