New Books in History

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Professor David Woodman is a foundational biography of Æthelstan (d. 939), the early medieval king whose territorial conquests and shrewd statesmanship united the peoples, languages, and cultures that would come to be known as the “kingdom of the English.” In this panoramic work, Dr. Woodman blends masterful storytelling with the latest scholarship to paint a multifaceted portrait of this immensely important but neglected figure, a man celebrated in his day as much for his benevolence, piety, and love of learning as he was for his ambitious reign.Set against the backdrop of warring powers in early medieval Europe, The First King of England sheds new light on Æthelstan's early life, his spectacular military victories and the innovative way he governed his kingdom, his fostering of the church, the deft political alliances he forged with Europe's royal houses, and his death and enduring legacy. It begins with the reigns of Alfred the Great and Edward the Elder, Æthelstan's grandfather and father, describing how they consolidated and expanded the “kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.” But it was Æthelstan who would declare himself the first king of all England when, in 927, he conquered the viking kingdom at York, required the submission of a Scottish king, and secured an annual tribute from the Welsh kings.Beautifully illustrated and breathtaking in scope, The First King of England is the most comprehensive, up-to-date biography of Æthelstan available, bringing a magisterial richness of detail to the life of a consequential British monarch whose strategic and political sophistication was unprecedented for his time. 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

In the long eighteenth century, as Britain grappled with the aftermath of the 1707 Acts of Union and consolidated a global empire, Welsh ‘Cambro-Britons' developed a movement of cultural awakening, reinventing their traditions for a new age. Amid profound local, national and imperial transformations, Welsh authors and activists sought to reimagine their history, language and literature, claiming a place for Wales and the Welsh diaspora in the British imperial order. Far from being an insular phenomenon, this revival intersected with key debates of the era, from enlightenment science and radical politics to colonial expansion, transatlantic abolitionism and metropolitan sociability. Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain, 1707-1819: True Britons and Celtic Empires (Boydell & Brewer, 2025) by Dr. Rhys Kaminski-Jones reframes Welsh cultural revivalism, revealing its fundamentally international and archipelagic dimensions. Nationally significant Welsh authors like Lewis Morris, David Samwell, Thomas Pennant, and Iolo Morganwg are placed in their transnational, imperial, and global contexts. Examined alongside Thomas Gray's British bardism, William Jones's Orientalism, and the imperialism of Cook's voyages, their writings demonstrate how Welsh thinkers engaged with – and shaped – shifting ideas of Britishness, empire, race, and identity. Drawing on new archival research, and giving equal attention to Welsh and English language texts, Dr. Kaminski-Jones challenges traditional narratives of Welsh cultural nationalism as a simple precursor to modern Welsh nationhood, instead positioning the revival as central to transatlantic intellectual currents. With its pathbreaking bilingual and interdisciplinary approach, this book offers fresh insights into the complexities of nationhood, empire, and cultural memory. 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

An international history of the uncanny in the 1920s and 1930s. The interwar period was a golden age for the occult. Spiritualists, clairvoyants, fakirs, Theosophists, mind readers, and Jinn summoners all set out to assure the masses that just as newly discovered invisible forces of electricity and magnetism determined the world of science, unseen powers commanded an unknown realm of human potential Drawing on untapped sources in Arabic in addition to European ones, Raphael Cormack follows two of the most unusual and charismatic figures of this age: Tahra Bey, who took 1920s Paris by storm in the role of a missionary from the mystical East; and Dr. Dahesh, who transformed Western science to create a panreligious faith of his own in Lebanon. Traveling between Paris, New York, and Beirut while guiding esoteric apprenticeships among miracle-working mystics in Egypt and Istanbul, these men reflected the desires and anxieties of a troubled age. As Cormack demonstrates, these forgotten holy men, who embodied the allure of the unexplained in a world of dramatic change, intuitively speak to our unsettling world today Raphael Cormack is an award-winning editor, translator, and writer. The author of Midnight in Cairo, Cormack is assistant professor of modern languages and cultures at Durham University in the United Kingdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it? Millions of people around the world today are enslaved; nearly eight million of them live in India, more than anywhere else. Freedomville: The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt (Columbia Global Reports, 2021) by Dr. Laura Murphy is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, who founded their own town of Azad Nagar—Freedomville—after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. International organizations championed this as a nonviolent “silent revolution” that inspired other villagers to fight for their own freedom. But Professor Murphy, a leading scholar of contemporary global slavery, who spent years researching and teaching about Freedomville, found that whispers and deflections suggested that there was something troubling about Azad Nagar's success. Professor Murphy embarks on a Rashomon-like retelling—a complex, constantly changing narrative of a murder that captures better than any sanitized account just why it is that slavery continues to exist in the twenty-first century. Freedomville's enormous struggle to gain and maintain liberty shows why it is unrealistic to expect radical change without violent protest—and how a global construction boom is deepening and broadening the alienation of impoverished people around the world. 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

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art. Now, for the first time, in The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever (Harper, 2023) Dr. Prudence Peiffer pays homage to these artists and the unsung impact their work had on the direction of late twentieth-century art and film. This remarkable biography, as transformative as the artists it illuminates, questions the very concept of a “group” or “movement,” as it spotlights the Slip's eclectic mix of gender and sexual orientation, abstraction and Pop, experimental film, painting, and sculpture, assemblage and textile works. Brought together not by the tenets of composition or technique, nor by philosophy or politics, the artists cultivated a scene at the Slip defined by a singular spirit of community and place. They drew lasting inspiration from one another, but perhaps even more from where they called home, and the need to preserve the solitude its geography fostered. Despite Coenties Slip's obscurity, the entire history of Manhattan was inscribed into its cobblestones—one of the first streets and central markets of the new colony, built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings at the tavern just down Pearl Street; named by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and site of the boom and bust of the city's maritime industry; and, in the artists's own time, a development battleground for Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. The Slip's history is entwined with that of the artists and their art—eclectic and varied work that was made from the wreckage of the city's many former lives. An ambitious and singular account of a time, a place, and a group of extraordinary people, The Slip investigates the importance of community, and makes an argument for how we are shaped by it, and how it in turns shapes our work. 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

California has long reigned as the land of plenty, a place where the sun always shines and opportunity beckons. Even prior to its statehood in 1850, it captured the world's imagination. We think of bearded prospectors lured by the promise of gold; we imagine its early embrace of immigrant labor during the railroad boom as prologue to its diverse social fabric today. But what lies underneath the myth is far more complicated. Thanks to extensive research by Michael Hiltzik, one of our longstanding voices on California, Golden State: The Making of California (Mariner Books, 2025) uncovers the unvarnished truth about the state we think we know well. From Spanish incursions into what became known as Alta California to the rise of Big Tech, the history of California is one of stark contradictions. In rich, previously overlooked detail, we see its earliest statesmen wreak havoc among native peoples while racing to draft their own constitution even ahead of statehood. Gold-hungry settlers venture into the Sierra foothills only to leave with little, while a handful of their suppliers turn themselves into millionaire railroad magnates. Wars erupt in the name of water as Los Angeles booms, and early efforts to tame the vast landscape create a haven for fossil fuel extraction and environmental conservation alike. Hollywood politicians stoke fear, contributing to a centuries-long tradition of anti-Asian violence, and, remarkably, legal redlining and free higher education take root together. Golden State brings a fresh critical eye to the origins of the state against which the rest of the country measures itself. From its very start, Hiltzik shows, the story of the United States was written in California. 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

For generations of Americans, the purse has been an essential and highly adaptable object, used to achieve a host of social, cultural, and political objectives. In the early 1800s, when the slim fit of neoclassical dresses made interior pockets impractical, upper-class women began to carry small purses called reticules, which provided them with a private place in a world where they did not have equal access to public space. Although many items of apparel have long expressed their wearer's aspirations, only the purse has offered carriers privacy, pride, and pleasure. This privacy has been particularly important for those who have faced discrimination because of their gender, class, race, citizenship, or sexuality. The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford University Press, 2025) reveals how bags, sacks, and purses provided the methods and materials for Americans' activism, allowing carriers to transgress critical boundaries at key moments. It explores how enslaved people used purses and bags when attempting to escape and immigrant factory workers fought to protect their purses in the workplace. It also probes the purse's nuanced functions for Black women in the civil rights movement and explores how LGBTQ people used purses to defend their bodies and make declarations about their sexuality. Kathleen Casey closely examines a variety of sources--from vintage purses found in abandoned buildings and museum collections to advertisements, photograph albums, trade journals, newspaper columns, and trial transcripts. She finds purses in use at fraught historical moments, where they served strategic and symbolic functions for their users. The result is a thorough and surprising examination of an object that both ordinary and extraordinary Americans used to influence social, cultural, economic, and political change. Kathleen B. Casey is Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Professor of History at Furman University in South Carolina. Caleb Zakarin is editor 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

South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law (Oxford UP, 2024) considers the legal history of colonial rule in South Asia from 1757 to the early 20th century. It traces a shift in the conceptualization of sovereignty, land control, and adjudicatory rectification, arguing that under the East India Company the focus was on 'the laws' factoring into the administration of justice more than 'the law' as an infinitely generative norm system. This accompanied a discourse about rendering property 'absolute' defined in terms of a certainty of controlling land's rent-and made administrable mainly as a duty of revenue payment--rather than any right of ostensibly physical dominion. Leaving property external to its ontology of 'the laws, ' the Company's regime thus differed significantly from its counterparts in the Anglo-common-law mainstream, where an ostensibly unitary, physical, and disaggregable notion of the property right was becoming a stand in for a notion of legal right in general already by the late 18th century. Only after 1858, under Crown rule, did conditions in the subcontinent ripen for 'the law' to emerge as a purportedly free-standing institutional fact. A key but neglected factor in this transformation was the rise of classical legal thought, which finally enabled property's internalization into 'the law' and underwrote status and contract becoming the other key elements of the Raj's new legal ontology. Formulating a historical ontological approach to jurisprudence, the book deploys a running distinction between the doctrinal discourse of (the) law and ordinary-language discourse about (the) law that carries implications for legal theory well beyond South Asia. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union's demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe's bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland's razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump's first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America's “Cold War University”—and who ousted Washington's gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run US foreign policy for so long.Brzezinski's impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow's “Achilles heel”—the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow's grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush's Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history's orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers in the United States of America. His words and ideas had a powerful impact on American liberalism and his writings on the media are still taught today. Lippmann is now the subject of Tom Arnold-Forster's Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton UP, 2025). Arnold-Forster explores Lippmann in his evolving historical context, from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. He argues that Lippmann was a much more complicated thinker than is usually recognized who went from being a liberal socialist to a conservative liberal. Arnold-Forster is a historian at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, where he works on the political and intellectual history of the modern United States and the history of political thought. His articles have appeared in scholarly journals and general interest publications. His article on Lippmann and public opinion, published in American Journalism, won the 2024 Dorothy Ross Prize for best article from the Society for United States Intellectual History. 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 and popular support for authoritarianism around the world and within traditional democracies have spurred debates over the meaning of the term “fascist” and when and whether it is appropriate to use it. The landmark study Fascism: The History of a Word (The University of Chicago Press, 2025) takes this debate further by tackling its most fundamental questions: How did the terms “fascism” and “fascist” come to be in the first place? How and in what circumstances have they been used? How can they be understood today? And what are the advantages (or disadvantages) of using “fascism” to make sense of interwar authoritarianism as well as contemporary politics?Exploring the writings and deeds of political leaders, activists, artists, authors, and philosophers, Federico Marcon traces the history of the term's use (and usefulness) in relation to Mussolini's political regime, antifascist resistance, and the quest of postwar historians to develop a definition of a “fascist minimum.” This investigation of the semiotics of “fascism” also aims to inquire about people's voluntary renunciation of the modern emancipatory ideals of freedom, equality, and solidarity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Elaine Weiss, acclaimed author of The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, follows that magisterial work with a work of equal scholarly significance and narrative excellence, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement (Simon and Schuster, 2025), "the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.""In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.” Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. In addition to Spell Freedom, she is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army of the Great War; and The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. Elaine lives with her husband in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more at her website. 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 unprecedented history of intelligence cooperation during the Cold War, Aviva Guttmann uncovers the key role of European intelligence agencies in facilitating Mossad's Operation Wrath of God; a campaign of assassination against Black September terrorists. She reveals how, in the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, Palestinians suspected of involvement in terrorism were hunted and killed by Mossad with active European cooperation. Through unique access to unredacted documents in the Club de Berne archive, she shows how a secret coalition of intelligence agencies supplied Mossad with information about Palestinians on a colossal scale and tacitly supported Israeli covert actions on European soil.  Agencies shared information via - Kilowatt - an encrypted channel. Through this channel agencies helped to anticipate and thwart a number of Palestinian terrorist plots, including some revealed here for the first time. At the same time, the Mossad was also able to exploit this information to carry out its covert assassinations, staying one step ahead of the investigations. Many European agencies also used the same channel to bolster their reputation in the context of counterterrorism. This extraordinary book reconstructs the hidden world of international intelligence, showing how this parallel order enabled state relations to be pursued independently of official foreign policy constraints or public scrutiny. It shows how intelligence agencies play be different rules and how covert diplomacy continues - and prospers - even in the aftermath of scandals and in those occasions in which open diplomacy is problematic.  Dr Luca Trenta, Associate Professor in International Relations, Swansea University, UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

It's easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history—obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction. In What Is Ancient History?, Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history—a global history that captures antiquity's pivotal role as a decisive phase in human development, one that provided the shared foundation of our world and continues to shape our lives today. For Scheidel, ancient history is when the earliest versions of today's ways of life were created and spread—from farming, mining, and engineering to housing and transportation, cities and government, writing and belief systems. Transforming the planet, this process unfolded all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, often at different times, sometimes haltingly but ultimately unstoppably. Yet it's rarely studied or taught that way. Since the eighteenth century, Western intellectuals have dismembered the ancient world, driven not only by their quest for professional expertise but also by nationalism, colonialism, racism, and the idealization of Greece and Rome. Specialized scholarship has fractured into numerous academic niches, obscuring broader patterns and dynamics and keeping us from understanding just how much humanity has long had in common. The time has come, Scheidel argues, to put the ancient world back together—by moving beyond the limitations of Greco-Roman “classics,” by systematically comparing ancient societies, and by exploring early exchanges and connections between them. The time has come, in other words, for an ancient history for everyone. New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review Walter Schiedel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A history of the dandy from below, from Beau Brummell and Baudelaire to Bowie and Bolan... and beyond. The historical figure of the dandy has commonly been described as an upper-class gentleman, often exemplified by well-known men such as Beau Brummell, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Max Beerbohm. But there is a broader history to be told about the dandy - one that incorporates unknown men from the lower strata of society. The Dandy: A People's History of Sartorial Splendour (Oxford UP, 2025) constitutes the first ever history of those dandies who emanated from the less privileged layers of the populace - the lowly clerks, shop assistants, domestic servants, and labourers who increasingly during the modern age have emerged as style-conscious men about town. Peter Andersson shows that dandyism is far from just an elite phenomenon represented by famous poets and artists. He shows how dandyism as a popular youth subculture grew into an influential cultural movement, from the days of Beau Brummell in the early 19th century to the age of mods in the 1960s. A series of fascinating in-depth studies of the wide variety of dandy subcultures that have surfaced around the world in the last two centuries tell the story of how the shaping of fashions and the image of men became increasingly democratized, with the arbiters of taste increasingly coming from the other end of the social spectrum. Along the way, we encounter such long-forgotten groups as the mashers, the knuts, the Paris gandins and the Berlin transgender dandies, alongside more well-known but unexplored figures like the zoot suiter, the teddy boy, and the New Romantic. Above all, this is a story of how fundamental aspects of modern culture such as fashion, style, and conduct have been shaped from below just as much as from above. It is a story that shows how the problematic business of young men trying to find an identity is an enduring phenomenon - and one sadly often accompanied by innocent victims along the way. Peter K. Andersson is a historian and writer, with a PhD in History from Lund University in Sweden. He has been a visiting scholar at the universities of London, Oxford, and Bologna, and has written extensively on Victorian cultural history, urban history, and popular culture. Caleb Zakarin is editor 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

What claims could Jewish veterans make on the Nazi state by virtue of their having fought for Germany? How often did Germans treat Jewish veterans differently from Jewish men without military experience during the Weimar and Nazi periods? How did perceptions of masculinity and of Germanness intersect to shape attitudes and behaviors of Jewish veterans?   Michael Geheran's wonderful new book Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler (Cornell UP, 2020) tries to understand how Jewish participation in World War I shaped their lives in 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. He uses a seemingly never-ending supply of diaries, letters, journals and other sources to paint a compelling picture of the ways in which German Jews understood their identities and influenced  their interactions with Germans and with the restrictions imposed by the Nazi Government. It raises new questions about how to periodize the Holocaust and how to think about the role of Germans--both civilian and military--in the persecution and elimination of German Jews. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution (LSU Press, 2024) unearths a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. While historians have generally acknowledged that patriot leaders assembled in response to postwar economic chaos, the threat of popular insurgencies, and the inability of the states to agree on how to fund the national government, Timothy Messer-Kruse suggests that scholars have discounted Americans' desire to compel Britain to return fugitives from slavery as a driving force behind the convention. During the Revolutionary War, British governors offered freedom to enslaved Americans who joined the king's army. Thousands responded by fleeing to English camps. After the British defeat at Yorktown, American diplomats demanded the surrender of fugitive slaves. When British generals refused, several states confiscated Loyalist estates and blocked payment of English creditors, hoping to apply enough pressure on the Crown to hand over the runaways. State laws conflicting with the 1783 Treaty of Paris violated the Articles of Confederation--the young nation's first constitution--but Congress, lacking an executive branch or a federal judiciary, had no means to obligate states to comply. The standoff over the escaped slaves quickly escalated following the Revolution as Britain failed to abandon the western forts it occupied and took steps to curtail American commerce. More than any other single matter, the impasse over the return of enslaved Americans threatened to hamper the nation's ability to expand westward, develop its commercial economy, and establish itself as a power among the courts of Europe. Messer-Kruse argues that the issue encouraged the founders to consider the prospect of scrapping the Articles of Confederation and drafting a superseding document that would dramatically increase federal authority--the Constitution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

An ambitious look at how the twentieth century's great powers devised their military strategies and what their implications mean for military competition between the United States and China. How will the United States and China evolve militarily in the years ahead? Many experts believe the answer to this question is largely unknowable. But Zack Cooper argues that the American and Chinese militaries are following a well-trodden path. For centuries, the world's most powerful militaries have adhered to a remarkably consistent pattern of behavior, determined largely by their leaders' perceptions of relative power shifts. By uncovering these trends, this book places the evolving military competition between the United States and China in historical context.  Drawing on a decade of research and on his experience at the White House and the Pentagon, Cooper outlines a novel explanation for how militaries change as they rise and decline. Tides of Fortune examines the paths of six great powers of the twentieth century, tracking how national leaders adjusted their defense objectives, strategies, and investments in response to perceived shifts in relative power. All these militaries followed a common pattern, and their experiences shed new light on both China's recent military modernization and America's potential responses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Winter Dreams: A Historical Guide to Old Age (Reaktion, 2025) is an evocative history of the ways the old have thought, felt and expressed themselves over two millennia, tracking the experience of ageing through artistic, literary and historical records. While old age is often depicted as ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything', Dr. Barbara H. Rosenwein shows that the elderly have always retained their emotional depth and desires. She explores how these have changed over time, as societies' views of the elderly and of a ‘good' old age have changed. And through careful exegesis, she allows the elderly, so often absent from the historical record, to speak to us. We live in a rapidly ageing society, yet ageism is rampant and death and dying are taboo subjects. Rosenwein's book is a finely wrought testimony to the value of ageing and the richness of our Winter Dreams. 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

Few politicians produced the musical reaction that Ronald Reagan did. His California-branded conservatism inspired countless young people to pick up guitars and thrash out their political angst. Punk bands across the United States took aim at the man, his presidency, and the idea of America he was selling to voters nationwide. Small yet vibrant scenes across the country emerged to challenge the communal norms and social values projected on them by the popular media and consumer culture. Punk enthusiast Robert Fitzgerald argues that these songs' lyrics aren't just catchy and fun to scream along with; they also reveal the thoughts and feelings of artists reacting to their political environment in real, forthright, and uncensored time.In Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan (UNC Press, 2025), Fitzgerald shows how these lyrics illustrated what young adults felt and how they reacted to one of the most influential and divisive leaders of the era. Punk lyrics are seemingly simple, the author argues, but they sketch out a complex, musically inspired countermovement that is as canonical in the American songbook as the folk and rock protest music that came before. Robert Fitzgerald is a laboratory school administrator and a lifelong punk fan. Robert Fitzgerald on UNC Press's website. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming book is U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, October 2025). Bradley Morgan on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of the Soviet Union that opened the Eastern Front in World War II. With lightning speed and devastating success, the German army tore through Soviet territory and rolled over the Red Army, scoring some of the most dramatic victories in military history--until the blitzkrieg bogged down during the approach on Moscow. At the spearhead of the attack was General Heinz Guderian, one of the most celebrated and controversial commanders of the war, who commanded a tank group in the center of the German front that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Guderian's Panzers reconstructs Barbarossa from the perspective of Generaloberst Guderian and his 2nd Panzer Group. With the German war machine at the height of its martial prowess in June 1941, Guderian's group of 250,000 men and 900 tanks rapidly broke through the Soviet frontier defenses and thrust some 600 kilometers into Soviet Russia in a matter of weeks--in doing so playing an integral part in the successful encirclement (cauldron) battles of Belostok-Minsk (June/July 1941) and Smolensk (July/August 1941); each of these battles resulting in the loss of several Soviet armies and hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Despite having sustained alarming losses of personal and equipment in these opening battles, Guderian pushed his men, and himself, to even greater achievements, culminating in the triumphant cauldron Battle of Kiev in the Ukraine (September 1941) that obliterated Soviet Southwestern Front and resulted in the capture of over 600,000 Red Army POWs. It was, perhaps, Germany's greatest victory in WWII, and Guderian had made it happen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Using newly available government records, private papers, and documents obtained through Freedom of Information, The Secret History of UK Vetting from 1909 to the Present (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Daniel Lomas tells the secret story of UK security vetting from 1909 to the present. Although Britain avoided American-style red-baiting and McCarthy-like witch-hunts, successive UK governments have, like their 'Five Eyes' allies, implemented security procedures to protect government, defence and industry from so-called 'subversives' and 'fellow travellers'.Officially, from 1948 the British government applied political tests to civil servants, a process extended to 'character defects' in the early 1950s with the introduction of 'positive vetting'. However, an unofficial purge had taken place for much longer, facing political backlashes as an infringement of 'civil liberties' and suppression of free speech. Although it's been argued that Britain's secret purge had little impact, this study looks at the experiences of those removed from the 'secret state', those LGBT and BAME individuals discriminated against by government, and the impact of government policy generally, while studying the responses of Ministers and civil servants to spy scandals and international events.Drawing from newly released archival material, Freedom of Information releases and interviews, this book offers new insights into the scope of government security checks on civil servants, defence contractors and armed forces personnel from Edwardian 'spy scares' and the inter-war period, to the Cold War and present day. 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

Bettina Ng'weno is Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, DavisNairobi, known as the Green City in the Sun, has taken shape through anti-urban ideologies that insist that the city cannot be home for most residents. Based on decades of experience in rapidly changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi (U of California Press, 2025) traverses rivers, cemeteries, parks, railways, housing estates, roads, and dancehalls to explore how policies of anti-urbanism manifest across time and space, shaping how people live in Nairobi. With deeply personal insights, Bettina Ng'weno highlights how people contest anti-urbanism through their insistence on building life in the city, even in the current dynamic of ubiquitous demolition and reconstruction. Through quotidian practices and creative resistance, they imagine alternatives to displacement, create belonging, and build new urban futures. This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Her research focuses on human mobilities and her new book has just been published (2025, 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

Julius Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but an unusually successful republican leader who was measured against the Republic's traditions and its greatest heroes of the past. Catastrophe befell Rome not because Caesar (or anyone else) turned against the Republic, its norms, and institutions, but because Caesar's extraordinary success mobilized a determined opposition that ultimately preferred to precipitate civil war rather than accept its political defeat. Based on painstaking re-analysis of the ancient sources in the light of recent advances in our understanding of the participatory role of the People in the republican political system, a strong emphasis on agents' choices rather than structural causation, and profound skepticism toward the facile determinism that often substitutes for historical explanation, Julius Caesar and the Roman People (Cambridge University Press, 2021) offers a radical reinterpretation of a figure of profound historical importance who stands at the turning point of Roman history from Republic to Empire. Robert Morstein-Marx is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Secular Enlightenment by Professor Margaret C. Jacob, has been called a major new history on how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives. It's a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and some began to spend their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions and their failures as the result of blind economic forces. A wonderful work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. Margaret Jacob is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her many books include The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans and The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation's urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (Norton, 2025), the vast majority of the fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords. Ansfield's book, based on a decade of research, introduces the term “brownlining” for the destructive insurance practices imposed on poor communities of color under the guise of racial redress. Ansfield shows that as the FIRE industries—finance, insurance, and real estate— eclipsed manufacturing in the 1970s, they began profoundly reshaping Black and Brown neighborhoods, seeing them as easy sources of profit. At every step, Ansfield charts the tenant-led resistance movements that sprung up in the Bronx and elsewhere, as well as the explosion of popular culture around the fires, from iconic movies like The Towering Inferno to hit songs such as “Disco Inferno.” Ultimately, they show how similarly pernicious dynamics around insurance and race are still at play in our own era, especially in regions most at risk of climate shocks. Bench Ansfield is Assistant Professor of History at Temple University. They hold a PhD in American Studies from Yale University and won the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American history from the Society of American Historians. They live in Philadelpha, Pennsylvania. Bluesky. Website. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance. Over time, horses came to power mighty empires in Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, and, later, Russia. Genghis Khan and the thirteenth-century Mongols offer the most famous example, but from ancient Assyria and Persia, to the seventeenth-century Mughals, to the high noon of colonialism in the early twentieth century, horse breeding was indispensable to conquest and statecraft. Scholar of Asian history David Chaffetz tells the story of how the horse made rulers, raiders, and traders interchangeable, providing a novel explanation for the turbulent history of the “Silk Road,” which might be better called the Horse Road. Drawing on recent research in fields including genetics and forensic archeology, Chaffetz presents a lively history of the great horse empires that shaped civilization. David Chaffetz is an independent scholar with a lifelong passion for Middle Eastern and Inner Asian history. His 1981 book, several times republished, A Journey through Afghanistan, earned praise from Owen Lattimore, the then doyen of Inner Asian studies in America and the UK. He is a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, and has written for the South China Morning Post and the Nikkei Asian Review. His most recent book, Three Asian Divas, describes the important role of elite women entertainers in the transmission of traditional Asian culture. 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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (Basic Books, 2025), historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin opens a longer and wider aperture on World War II and recasts the war as a brutal conflict for survival and hegemony between declining and ascendant imperial powers. Scorched Earth dismantles the myth of World War II as a “good war.” Instead, Chamberlin depicts the conflict as a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers' dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism. The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. And World War II did not deliver lasting peace: instead, the Soviet Union and United States emerged as hypermilitarized superpowers that would create arsenals of nuclear weapons, resulting in a decades-long Cold War standoff and subsequent violence across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.Dramatically rendered and persuasively argued, Scorched Earth offers a revisionist history of World War II, revealing it was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its execution, and imperial in its outcomes. Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The pursuit of wealth is considered an essential function of human nature, and greed is an unspoken civic virtue. Many of us revere billionaires and Wall Street rain-makers, then complain about “the system” being rigged, and wonder why the country doesn't seem to work for the little guy anymore. Some blame the Deep State for income inequality and corruption, and others blame capitalism, but the truth is that these issues have much deeper roots: our devotion to money is a manmade invention that has transformed over thousands of years to replace religion as the foundation of our society, and it is tearing civilization apart. In The Almightier, journalist Paul Vigna uncovers the forgotten history of money, tracing the uneasy and often accidental alliance between wealth and religion as it developed from ancient city-states to today's secular world, where religious devotion has receded and greed has stepped in to fill the void. Through engaging anecdotes, original research, and fresh perspectives on the causes of the many challenges we face today, Vigna makes a compelling argument that money has no power apart from the power we give it. Paul Vigna is an author, journalist, editor and speaker, with a particular focus on capital markets and cryptocurrencies. He is the author of Guts: The Anatomy of The Walking Dead and coauthor of The Age of Cryptocurrency and The Truth Machine. For 25 years, he was a reporter and editor for Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal, pioneering coverage of the cryptocurrency sector. He has appeared on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox, and PBS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The soundscape of prison life is that of constant clangs, bangs and jangles. What is the significance of this cacophonous din to those who live and work with it? Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown (Bristol UP, 2024) tells the story of a year spent with a UK prison community, bringing its social world vividly to life for the first time through aural ethnography. Dr. Kate Herrity's sensory criminology challenges current thinking on how power is experienced by the imprisoned and the lasting effects of incarceration for all who spend time in these environments. 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

With the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the shellac disc traveled the world and eventually became the dominant sound format in the first half of the twentieth century. Format Friction brings together a set of local encounters with the shellac disc, beginning with its preconditions in South Asian knowledge and labor, to offer a global portrait of this format.Spun at seventy-eight revolutions per minute, the shellac disc rapidly became an industrial standard even while the gramophone itself remained a novelty. The very basis of this early sound reproduction technology was friction, an elemental materiality of sound shaped through cultural practice. Using friction as a lens, Gavin Williams illuminates the environments plundered, the materials seized, and the ears entangled in the making of a sound format. Bringing together material, political, and music history, Format Friction decenters the story of a beloved medium, and so explores new ways of understanding listening in technological culture more broadly. Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University nathan.smith@yale.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Violence against women is out of control. Conviction rates for rape are so low that most survivors think it pointless to report, or later regret doing so. Ruthless trafficking gangs run the sex trade. Women have no confidence in the Metropolitan Police. The year is 1914. As the First World War began, a group of British campaigners founded the Women Police Volunteers, hoping to protect the vulnerable both from crime and from patriarchal policing and justice. The movement's pioneers included a militant suffragette who'd spent time behind bars, a moral purity activist, a blue-blooded radical, and a court reporter born in the workhouse to a single mother. In Controlling Women: The Untold Story of Britain's First Female Police Force (Hurst, 2025) Sandra Hempel follows their astonishing journey, through all of its troubling turns. Controlling Women is a vivid snapshot of rapid national change, and a rich tapestry of ethics and emotions among its fascinating characters. Reconciling political ideals with institutional compromise, these bold, complex women made history, despite establishment opposition and destructive infighting. They show us just how far we have to go in the fight for women's justice. 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

How do social movements arise, wield power, and bring about meaningful change? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these and other salient questions in this “visionary, cautionary, timely, and utterly necessary book” (Nicole Eustace), narrating how some of America's most influential twentieth-century social movements transformed the nation.Beginning with the turn-of-the century settlement house movement, the book compares Chicago's celebrated Hull-House, begun by privileged women, to a much less well known African American project, Cleveland's Phillis Wheatley House, begun by a former sharecropper. Expanding her highly praised book The Second Coming of the KKK, the second chapter shows how a northern Klan became a mass movement in the 1920s. Contrary to what many Klan opponents thought, this KKK was a middle-class organization, its members primarily urban and well educated. In the 1930s, the KKK gave birth to dozens of American fascist groups—small but extremely violent. Profiles of two other 1930s movements follow: the Townsend campaign for old-age insurance, named for its charismatic leader, Dr. Francis Townsend. It created the public pressure that brought us Social Security, which was considered radical at the time, as was the movement to bring about federal unemployment aid for millions.Proceeding to the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott—which jump-started the career of Martin Luther King, Jr.—the narrative shows how the city's entire Black population refused to ride segregated buses; initiated by Black women, their years-long, hard-fought victory inspired the civil rights movement. Gordon then examines the 1970s farmworkers struggle, led by Cesar Chavez and made possible by the work of tens of thousands of the primarily Mexican American farmworkers. Together they built the United Farm Workers Union, winning better wages and working conditions for some of the country's poorest workers. The book concludes with the dramatic stories of two Boston socialist feminist groups, Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective, which influenced the whole women's liberation movement. Linda Gordon is professor emerita of history and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. She is the winner of two Bancroft prizes for best book in American History.  Her previous work includes The Second Coming of the KKK and a biography of the photographer Dorothea Lange. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Protestant and Atlantic. Driven by his strong sense of the historical and moral shortcomings of the usual story, Thomas A. Tweed offers a very different narrative in this ambitious new history. He begins the story much earlier—11,000 years ago—at a rock shelter in present-day Texas and follows Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, transnational migrants, and people of many faiths as they transform the landscape and confront the big lifeway transitions, from foraging to farming and from factories to fiber optics. Setting aside the familiar narrative themes, Dr. Tweed highlights sustainability, showing how religion both promoted and inhibited individual, communal, and environmental flourishing during three sustainability crises: the medieval Cornfield Crisis, which destabilized Indigenous ceremonial centers; the Colonial Crisis, which began with the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and the enslavement of Africans; and the Industrial Crisis, which brought social inequity and environmental degradation. The unresolved Colonial and Industrial Crises continue to haunt the nation, Dr. Tweed suggests, but he recovers historical sources of hope as he retells the rich story of America's religious past. Our guest is: Dr. Thomas A. Tweed, who is professor emeritus of American Studies and history at the University of Notre Dame. A past president of the American Academy of Religion, he is the editor of Retelling U.S. Religious History and the author numerous books including Religion: A Very Short Introduction, and Religion in the Lands That Became America. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in American history. She works as a grad student and dissertation coach, and is a developmental editor for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast and the author of the Academic Life newsletter, found at christinagessler.substack.com Playlist for listeners: The Lost Journals of Sacajewea Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From A Wounded Desert Gay on God's Campus How to Human The Good-Enough Life Mindfulness A Conversation About Yiddish Studies Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Philip Carr-Gomm joins Jana Byars to talk about A Brief History of Nakedness (Reaktion, 2010) on the occasion of its newest paperback edition. From the naked sages of India to modern-day witches and Christian nudists, from Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga, Carr-Comm writes a survey of the touching, sometimes tragic, and often bizarre story of our relationships with our naked bodies. As one common story goes, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, had no idea that there was any shame in their lack of clothes; they were perfectly confident in their birthday suits among the animals of the Garden of Eden. All was well until that day when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and went scrambling for fig leaves to cover their bodies. Since then, lucrative businesses have arisen to provide many stylish ways to cover our nakedness, for the naked human body now evokes powerful and often contradictory ideas--it thrills and revolts us, signifies innocence and sexual experience, and often marks the difference between nature and society. In A Brief History of Nakedness psychologist Philip Carr-Gomm traces our inescapable preoccupation with nudity. Rather than studying the history of the nude in art or detailing how the naked body has been denigrated in the media, A Brief History of Nakedness reveals how religious teachers, politicians, protesters, and cultural icons have used nudity to enlighten or empower themselves as well as entertain us. Among his many examples, Carr-Gomm discusses how advertisers and the media employ images of bare skin--or even simply the word "naked"--to garner our attention, how mystics have used nudity to get closer to God, and how political protesters have discovered that baring all is one of the most effective ways to gain publicity for their cause. Carr-Gomm investigates how this use of something as natural as nakedness actually gets under our skin and evokes complicated and complex emotional responses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The German Democratic Republic has come to stand as a symbol of communist tyranny, a source of Cold War nostalgia and socialist kitsch, and a failed alternative to the worst excesses of 21st century capitalism. In this book, Ned Richardson-Little delves into the central contradictions of the GDR state: This book illustrates the fault lines of GDR society, the worldviews and experiences of not only those who ruled the GDR, but also those who rebelled against the strictures of state socialism, and those in between who sought a normal life under dictatorship. The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a succinct and comprehensive history of East Germany that traces its story from the country's origins as the Soviet Zone of Occupation after World War II through key events such as the 1953 Uprising, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Helsinki Accords, and the collapse of state socialism in 1989. Some of the themes explored include the memory of Nazism and national identity, everyday life under dictatorship, including consumerism, sexuality, and racism, the global politics of the GDR, the diversity of dissenting voices, and the competing visions for East Germany's democratic future. Guest: Ned Richardson-Little (he/him) is a Research Fellow in Department V: Globalizations in a Divided World at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF), in Germany. He is a historian of modern Germany, with a focus on the GDR, socialism, far-right extremism, and the history of international law and international crime. He is the author of The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany (2020), and co-editor of Socialism and International Law (2024). Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The term “Heimat,” referring to a local sense of home and belonging, has been the subject of much scholarly and popular debate following the fall of the Third Reich. Countering the persistent myth that Heimat was a taboo and unusable term immediately after 1945, Geographies of Renewal uncovers overlooked efforts in the aftermath of the Second World War to conceive of Heimat in more democratic, inclusive, and pro-European modes. It revises persistent misconceptions of Heimat as either tainted or as a largely reactionary idea, revealing some surprisingly early identifications between home and democracy. Jeremy DeWaal further traces the history of efforts to eliminate the concept, which first emerged during the Cold War crisis of the early 1960s, and reassesses why so many on the political left sought to re-engage with Heimat in the 1970s and 1980s. This revisionist history intervenes in larger contemporary debates, asking compelling questions surrounding the role of the local in democracy, the value of community, and the politics of place attachments. Guest: Jeremy DeWaal (he/him), is Lecturer in European History at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on German cultural history, spatial history, memory, and the history of emotions. DeWaal's work on Heimat and democracy has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Central European History Society, and the Berlin Programme at the Free University of Berlin. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Officially, women in the Soviet Union enjoyed a degree of equality unknown elsewhere in Allied countries at the time. However, long-standing norms of gendered behavior and stereotypes that cast women as morally weak, politically fallible, and sexually tempting meant that women in the army or living behind enemy lines were viewed with skepticism, seen as weak points easily exploited by the enemy. Concerned about sabotage, espionage, and ideological corruption, authorities categorized women who fraternized with the enemy—or who were suspected of doing so—as “socially dangerous,” a uniquely Soviet legal designation that exposed the accused to prosecution, imprisonment, and exile. Even without official sanction, women rumored to be involved with German occupiers were reviled, and treated accordingly, by their neighbors. By reading official reports against the grain and incorporating rare personal documents, Kazyulina provides a multifaceted study of the realities for non-Jewish Soviet women—in the army or resistance, or at home in occupied territories—during and after Nazi occupation. Guest: Regina Kazyulina (she/her), is the assistant director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a visiting assistant professor of history. She teaches in the Graduate Certificate Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her research interests include everyday life under German occupation, the “Holocaust by Bullets,” and the gendered lived experiences of Soviet civilians. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

­A Glimpse of Ogoni Women's Activism: The Transnational Struggle for Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2025) with Mariam Olugbodi “Ogoni Women's Activism” is a democratic feminist movement, and a nonviolent struggle against oil spills and environmental destruction in the Niger-Delta Nigeria in the 90s. The Federation of Ogoni Women Activists (FOWA) emerges to charge forward the course of sovereignty for both humans and the Niger-Delta ecosystem. The nonviolent resistance of the Ogoni Women through prayer meetings, fasting, and singing for community mobilisation epitomises a "love in action" (Dube, 2025) strategy to identity negotiation in the face of dehumanisation. The book, Ogoni Women's Activism: The Transnational Struggle for Justice, is a voyage into the history of the Ogoni tribes of the Niger-Delta, their lives, their ordeals of racism in their home nation with highlights of experiences of African immigrant women, the racialised refugees abroad, who fled from their home nation to seek sovereignty. The book builds on contemporary frameworks and adopts interdisciplinary approaches to unveil the outstanding revolutionary efforts of the Ogoni women in the Niger-Delta. 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 assessesible 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 @ (22) Olugbodi Mariam | LinkedIn, Mariam Olugbodi (0000-0001-5027-6644) - ORCID and User:Margob28 - Meta Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The articles appearing in this volume were presented at a conference entitled “Microhistories in Armenian Studies” organized by the Armenian Studies Program of California State University, Fresno, on September 22-23, 2023. They have since been edited and appear here in a single volume. The present study focuses on Armenian studies from a conceptual, theoretical and methodological approach. Each article, both in its methodological approach and its unique archival material, offers new insights by blending micro and macrohistorical perspectives on the major issues they address in Armenian Studies. 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 book Monopolizing Knowledge: The East India Company and Britain's Second Scientific Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2025), author Jessica Ratcliff traces the changing practices of knowledge accumulation and management at the British East India Company, focusing on the Company's library, museum, and colleges in Britain. Although these institutions were in Britain, they were funded by taxes from British India and they housed, so it was argued, the “national” collections of British India. The book examines how these institutions emerged from the Company's unique form of monopoly-based colonial capitalism. It then argues that this “Company science” would go on to shape and eventually become absorbed into Britain's public (i.e. state-funded) science in the later nineteenth century. Soumyadeep Guha is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the State University of New York, Binghamton, with research interests in Agrarian History, the History of Science and Technology, and Global History, focusing on 19th and 20th century India. His MA dissertation, War, Science and Survival Technologies: The Politics of Nutrition and Agriculture in Late Colonial India, explored how wartime imperatives shaped scientific and agricultural policy during the Second World War in India. Currently, his working on his PhD dissertation on the histories of rice and its production between colonial and early post-colonial Bengal, examining the entangled trajectories of agrarian change, scientific knowledge, and state-making. 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 sweeping new history of humanity, told through the prism of our ever-changing moral norms and values, Hanno Sauer shows how modern society is just the latest step in the long evolution of good and evil and everything in between. What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose -- and why we need them. We humans were born to cooperate, but everywhere we find ourselves in conflict. The way we live together has changed fundamentally in recent decades: global mobility, demographic upheaval, migration movements, and digital networking, have all called the moral foundations of human communities into question. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share. If we understand the origin of our morality, we can understand its future too. With philosophical expertise and empirical data, Sauer explains how processes of biological, cultural, social, and historical evolution shaped the moral grammar that defines our present. Seven chapters recount the crucial moral upheavals of human history showing how the emergence of humankind five million years ago, the rise of first civilizations 5,000 years ago, and the dynamics of moral progress in the last fifty years are interrelated. This genealogical perspective allows us, on the one hand, to see the contradictions and potential conflicts of our moral identities; on the other, it makes clear that we share fundamental values that apply to all human beings at all times. Sauer's elegant prose, translated into English by Jo Heinrich, brings the history of humanity to vivid new life. Hanno Sauer is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He teaches ethics, metaethics and political philosophy. 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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history