New Books in Intellectual History

The field of employment law used to be called "master-servant law." Even if this term has fallen out of favor, a central truth has not changed: modern employment law still draws on centuries-old ideas about the rights and obligations of workers. In The Master-Servant Doctrine: How Old Legal Rules Haunt the Modern Workplace (U California Press, 2025), Elizabeth Chika Tippett combines historical context with contemporary case studies and interviews to reveal how modern law and management practices are steeped in three core master-servant principles: the right to control, the right to govern, and the duty of support. With each chapter tackling a different aspect of the workplace—including pay, time management, firing, and benefits—this startling and original story of employment law offers fresh insights for legal scholars, historians, attorneys, advocates, and anyone who's ever worked a terrible job. 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/intellectual-history

Feminism's Empire (Cornell UP, 2022) investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing "pro-imperialist" and "anti-imperialist" as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposed—yet employed—approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation. Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of "nature" that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Feminists faced similar barriers to full incorporation due to the gendered contradictions inherent in universalism. The system presumed citizenship to be male and thus positioned women as outsiders. Feminism's Empire connects this critical struggle to hierarchical power shifts in racial and national status that created uneasy linkages between French feminists and imperial authorities. Dr. Carolyn J. Eichner about is a Professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Feminism's Empire is her third book. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune came out in 2004 and The Paris Commune: A Brief History came out in 2022. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune was published in French as Franchir les barricades: les femmes dans la Commune de Paris (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020). Translated by Bastien Craipain, it was a finalist for the Prix Augustin Thierry in 2021, an award from the city of Paris for a historical study concerning the period between Antiquity and the late 19th century. In 2022-2023 she will be a Fulbright Research scholar in France and will be in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he's not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in academic research in Marxism and related fields, and many researchers have been stepping up to the plate to offer rigorous analysis and critical reanimations of Marxist theory. One particularly exciting place where this is included is the Palgrave series Marx, Engels and Marxisms, which has been steadily putting new titles out for close to a decade. Including original monographs, edited collections and translated texts, the series covers a wide variety of topics for those interested in rediscovering and developing a Marxism ready to face the 21st century. This conversation with one of the editors is intended to serve as an overview of the series, with more traditional episodes to follow in the near future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Originating in the Nineteenth Century, the European idea of development was shaped around the premise that the West possessed progressive characteristics that the East lacked. As a result of this perspective, many alternative development discourses originating in the East were often overlooked and forgotten. Indian Economics is but one example. By recovering thought from the margins, Relocating Development Economics: The First Generation of Modern Indian Economists (Cambridge UP, 2024) exposes useful new ways of viewing development. It looks at how an Indian tradition in economic thought emerged from a group of Indian economists in the late Nineteenth Century who questioned dominant European economic ideas on development and agricultural economics. This book shows how the first generation of modern Indian economists pushed at the boundaries of existing theories to produce reformulations that better fit their subcontinent and opens up discursive space to find new ways of thinking about regress, progress, and development. Soumyadeep Guha is a fourth-year PhD student in the History Department at Binghamton University, New York. He is interested in historical research focusing on themes such as Agrarian/Environmental History, History of Science and Tech, Global History, and their intersections. His prospective dissertation questions are on the pre-history of the ‘Green Revolution' in Eastern India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In The State (Princeton University Press, 2023), the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking, offering a major new account of the foundations of the state and the nature of justice. In doing so, Pettit builds a new theory of what the state is and what it ought to be, addresses the normative question of how justice serves as a measure of the success of a state, and the way it should operate in relation to its citizens and other people. Philip Pettit is L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton University and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant 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/intellectual-history

Since the early days of Buddhism in China, monastics and laity alike have expressed a profound concern with the past. In voluminous historical works, they attempted to determine as precisely as possible the dates of events in the Buddha's life, seeking to iron out discrepancies in varying accounts and pinpoint when he delivered which sermons. Buddhist writers chronicled the history of the Dharma in China as well, compiling biographies of eminent monks and nuns and detailing the rise and decline in the religion's fortunes under various rulers. They searched for evidence of karma in the historical record and drew on prophecy to explain the past. John Kieschnick provides an innovative, expansive account of how Chinese Buddhists have sought to understand their history through a Buddhist lens. Exploring a series of themes in mainstream Buddhist historiographical works from the fifth to the twentieth century, he looks not so much for what they reveal about the people and events they describe as for what they tell us about their compilers' understanding of history. Kieschnick examines how Buddhist doctrines influenced the search for the underlying principles driving history, the significance of genealogy in Buddhist writing, and the transformation of Buddhist historiography in the twentieth century. This book casts new light on the intellectual history of Chinese Buddhism and on Buddhists' understanding of the past. As I say in the interview, Buddhist Historiography in China (Columbia University Press, 2022) is one of those that you hope exists out there somewhere, and are delighted when you find out it does! This book is highly recommended not only for those with a keen interest in Buddhism and Chinese history, but also those fascinated by questions of historiography and temporarily more broadly.  Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen where they work on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty. They are interested in questions of identity, and the complexities of working with different kinds of sources textually and materially. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Conservatism needs to be rediscovered. That is, it needs to be differentiated from the post WWII concept of liberal democracy and return to its traditional three pillars of religion, nationalism, and economic growth. And it needs to be thought of as Anglo-American conservatism, rooted in the tradition of the English Constitution going back to such thinkers as John Fortescue (c. 1394 –1479) and John Selden (1584 –1654). We need to be a God-fearing nation, with nation and religion at the center of our national belief system. We must live conservative lives. These are some of the arguments made by the political theorist and public intellectual Yoram Hazony in his 2022 book Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery Publishing, 2022). It is a provocative book that even many conservatives may take issue with. For example, Hazony puts a great deal of emphasis on the importance of hierarchy both within the family and in society at large. Given that a good deal of the rationale of right-wing thinking in recent years has been predicated on the necessity for non-violent rebellion against the establishment in the Republican party and the left-wing dominance of academia, Hazony's arguments may not be embraced by large swaths of the right. But to get conservatives and those on the right who do not identify as such thinking about what they stand for, what they want and how to get it is one of the goals of the book. It succeeds. To those who might blanch at the embrace of religion in the public sphere, Hazony argues that for all intents and purposes the increasingly powerful political philosophy woke neo-Marxism is itself a religion. Hazony criticizes the right for acquiescing in the relegation of traditional religion to the private sphere. He argues robustly for religion, particularly Christianity, to serve as a countervailing force to wokeism. In the face of a progressive order that leaves people in the position of being unable to distinguish between a man and a woman, Hazony advocates for such measures as ending the ban on the Bible and God in the public school classroom. This is a full-throated defense of conservatism and is, therefore, must reading for those on all sides of the political spectrum. Hazony addresses the need for the idea of a nation, its cohesion, and its inherited traditions. For that, he says, you need conservatism. And by conservatism, he means a public conservatism, a public traditionalism in those places where there is a majority that will support it. Hazony maintains that our culture must support parents and congregations in the work of the transmission of values that ensure respect for tradition, nation and hierarchy. This book is a substantive intellectual history of conservative thought and profiles significant figures in the conservative movement (e.g., William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk). It is also a clarion call for those who claim to be conservatives to live genuinely conservative lives. Hazony urges conservatives to stand up for principles like the public acknowledgment of God and such core values as the honor due parents by their adult children, loyalty within marriage, and observance of the sabbath. In the Hazony version of conservatism, all ten of the Ten Commandments ought to be the basis for our country's social and political life. He includes in his book a memoir of his days at Princeton University in the 1980s, where a campus culture of loose living and rampant drinking led him to seek out a life of faith and family. College students of today and their parents would do well to read this moving chronicle of a young person surrounded by decadence who escapes its ravages via a solid marriage and a return to traditional religion. Let's hear from Mr. Hazony about his book and the path forward for conservatives and America itself. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became a living legend. But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure; we know that he was born into a modest rural family, that he led a private and solitary life, and that, in spite of poor health and unusual emotional vulnerabilities, he worked tirelessly to achieve exquisite new effects in verse. Vergil's most famous work, the Aeneid, was commissioned by the emperor Augustus, who published the epic despite Vergil's dying wish that it be destroyed. In Vergil: The Poet's Life (Yale UP, 2023), Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil's own writings in an endeavor to reconstruct his life and personality. Through her intimate knowledge of Vergil's work, she evokes the image of a poet who was committed to creating something astonishingly new and memorable, even at great personal cost. Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Bhagavad Gita is a world classic often considered to be not just the 'Hindu Bible' but sometimes the 'Indian Bible' as well. Over the last two centuries, it has attracted much scholarly attention from Indologists. Ithamar Theodor's bold and revisionist monograph The Philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita (Cambridge UP, 2025) aspires to further develop their scholarship by treating the Gita as a discrete philosophy and by offering a systematic survey of its main topics and doctrines, in so doing emphasising their philosophical potential. A major innovation here is the articulation of the Gita's structure extracted from Vedantic and Yogic pattens of thought, presented in a modern fashion. This centres on the Gita's Vedantic concept of hierarchical reality and its Yogic concept of a ladder. Beyond its overarching philosophical and holistic approach to the Bhagavad Gita, the book addresses major themes such as dharma, rebirth, Yoga and Sankhya, bhakti, the Upanishadic nature of the text, and concepts of divinity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In the West, World War II is commonly understood as the Allies' struggle against Nazism. Often elided, if not simply forgotten, is the Soviet Union's crucial role in that fight. With this book, acclaimed historian Jochen Hellbeck rectifies this omission by relocating the ideological core of the conflict. It was not the Western powers but Communist Russia that Nazi Germany viewed as an existential threat—in fact, “World Enemy No. 1.” Jewish revolutionaries, the Nazis believed, had seized power in 1917 and were preparing the Soviet state to destroy Germany and the world. And so, on June 22, 1941, a German army of three million attacked the Soviet Union to exterminate “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Hitler's cardinal obsession. While Europe's Jews were expelled, exiled, and persecuted by the Nazis, Soviet Jews were immediately slated for elimination. The Soviet lands thus became ground zero for systematic extermination, which was only later extended to all Jews, igniting the Holocaust.Hellbeck plumbs newly declassified archives and previously undiscovered sources—testimonies, diaries, and dispatches from soldiers and civilians, Soviet and German—to offer a unique history that takes account of both sides. He reconstructs the years leading up to the war when “Europe against Bolshevism” was the Nazis' most fervid rallying cry, and documents their annihilatory ambitions on the battlegrounds in the East. Widely disseminated accounts of German atrocities mobilized millions of Soviet citizens to join a people's war against the hated invaders. Hellbeck tracks the desire for revenge that drove the Red Army on its path of reconquest, an advance that further inflamed the belief in a murderous “Bolshevik Jew,” stirring the Germans to fight to the bitter end. Recounted here in vivid detail are the events at Babi Yar, the Battle of Stalingrad, the liberation of the concentration camps, and the arrival of the Red Army in the Nazi capital. Finally, Hellbeck reckons with the West's persistent disregard of the Soviet Union's incalculable contribution to winning the war—and its sacrifice of twenty-six million citizens—as anti-communism and the Cold War turned erstwhile allies into mortal enemies.Hellbeck's eye-opening work is an astonishing new reading of both the Second World War and how its history has been told. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In After Transformation, Maia Kotrosits offers a lyrical history of Christian late antiquity as it lives on in and with the present. Recasting the monumental changes that occurred between the second and fourth centuries, when Rome transitioned from pagan to Christian worship, Kotrosits presents a condensed and evocative meditation on the profound effects of Christian imperialism across time and geography. She employs a collection of forms ranging from micro-essay and vignette to poem and fragment to capture human struggles with time and change, showing how the mundane and intimate details of our lives can themselves be conduits of historical knowing. Arguing for lyricism as a method, Kotrosits reclaims vulnerability, urgency, and storytelling in historical work to model new ways of writing the past and experiencing ourselves more fully in time. Above all, After Transformation is about the ironies of the ways that history is written against the reality of the ways that history is lived. New books in Late Antiquity is sponsored by Ancient Jew Review Maia Kotrosits is a Visiting Scholar/Researcher, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School and an expert in ancient Judaism and Christianity, writing long histories of empire, colonialism, and race. 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/intellectual-history

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, chats with Verena Halsmeyer, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vienna, about her recent, award-winning book, Managing Growth in Miniature: Solow's Model as an Artifact. The book explores the history of the way economists think about growth, including the role of technological change in it. It focuses on the period between the 1930s and 1960s, tracing the development of the famed 'Solow growth model,' one of the central mathematical models in postwar economics. The pair also talk about the intersections between the history of science and the history of economics and how we all can learn to focus on practices - that is, what people do - rather than on ideas alone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe working through a pack of cigarettes and coffee, working on his latest play while waiting for his friend Pierre to arrive. His theories of freedom against the temptations of bad faith are thought to be theories of writers and activists, resisters of occupation. But while this is no doubt a central part of his thinking, it misses another context he was very much interested in: the clinic. While he was not an orthodox Freudian or trained analyst, he was deeply interested in many of the questions that psychoanalysts are also interested in, and this intersection proved to be very productive, generating thousands of pages of lesser known works. This is what Mary Edwards, philosophy lecturer at Cardiff University, has written about in her new book Sartre's Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (Bloomsbury, 2022). Working through Sartre's output from beginning to end, it first sets the stage with his early claims about the nature of the self and the possibility of knowing a person. From there, it works to his later works, in particular his voluminous yet unfinished biography of Gustave Flaubert, where Edwards finds Sartre developing and applying a very particular method of understanding a person while nonetheless maintaining a respect for their free nature. While Sartre never completed his intended project, Edwards finds his attempt suggestive for rethinking life both in and beyond the clinic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Wilberforce, Clarkson, Wesley. Britain's great abolitionist activist Granville Sharp. Each of these consequential figures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world were galvanized by the moral power of a modest Quaker teacher who never ventured more than a few miles from his home in Philadelphia: Anthony Benezet. While Benezet was buried in an unmarked grave, his fingerprints are all over the extinction of the Atlantic slave trade and the gathering strength of America's own burgeoning abolitionist movement. He was a figure of global importance, “a saint,” Garry Wills called him, a great bearer to the rest of the world of the American ideals (no matter how compromised) of equality and liberty.Anthony Benezet lived, by chance, at the nexus of radical Christianity and revolutionary democracy, and he fused the power of those two streams of morality in a way that changed lives and challenged political institutions so compellingly that the world became a different place because of him. But for all the magnitude of Benezet's impact, he is largely unknown outside scholars of the period. He does not exist in any meaningful way in the widely read histories and biographies that define and amplify America's historical consciousness.In Anthony Benezet: Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist (U Georgia Press, 2025), preeminent biographer Dr. David Chanoff tells Benezet's story—who he was, what he did, how he did it, and why it was that William Penn's “Holy Experiment” of Pennsylvania provided the matrix for the historic transformation the abolitionist educator brought about. Indeed, Dr. Chanoff carves out a place for this forgotten American hero as a pioneering figure among those who launched American ideals onto the world stage. 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/intellectual-history

Faisal Devji's Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale UP, 2025) is a compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical actor. Until the nineteenth century, Islam was variously understood as a set of beliefs and practices. But after Muslims began to see their faith as an historical actor on the world stage, they needed to narrate Islam's birth anew as well as to imagine its possible death. Faisal Devji argues that this change, sparked by the crisis of Muslim sovereignty in the age of European empire, provided a way of thinking about agency in a global context: an Islam liberated from the authority of kings and clerics had the potential to represent the human race itself as a newly empirical reality. Ordinary Muslims, now recognized as the privileged representatives of Islam, were freed from traditional forms of Islamic authority. However, their conception of Islam as an impersonal actor in history meant that it could not be defined in either religious or political terms. Its existence as a civilizational and later ideological subject also deprived figures like God and the Prophet of their theological subjectivities while robbing the Muslim community of its political agency. Devji illuminates this history and explores its ramifications for the contemporary Muslim world. Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores the historical categories of caste, religion, ecology, and sovereignties in South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific interests, his disciplinary interests revolve around public history, anthropology, literary studies, the digital humanities, and more recently, the history and politics of Artificial Intelligence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Today we will be talking to Yehudah Halper about his new book, Averroes on Pathways to Divine Knowledge (Academic Studies Press, 2025). The twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Averroes sought to understand the divine in a way independent of religious theology, by turning to the philosophical works of Aristotle and, to a lesser extent, Plato. In doing so, he established standards of scientific inquiry into God that were and remain highly influential on Jewish and Christian thought. Averroes, however, does not provide much in the way of demonstrative knowledge of God, and most of his arguments remain dialectical, rhetorical, or political. This volume explores the various pathways towards attaining divine knowledge that we find in Averroes' commentaries on Aristotle's De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, and on Plato's Republic, along with Averroes' Epistle on Divine Knowledge, Decisive Treatise, and more. Yehuda Halper is Professor in the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University. He is currently a aisiting professor at University of Chicago Divinity School. His first monograph, Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age without Plato (Brill, 2021) won the Goldstein-Goren Book Award for the best book in Jewish Thought in 2019-2021. He is currently directing the ISF grant (#622/22) "Samuel Ibn Tibbon's Explanation of Foreign Terms and the Foundations of Philosophy in Hebrew." Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid. His latest book is Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge UP, 2025) tells the story of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A century and more earlier, Patna had been an important and populous city, but it came to be seen by many-and is still  seen today-as merely part of the mofussil, the provincial hinterland. Despite Patna's real decline, it continued to nurture a vibrant intellectual culture that linked it with cities and towns across northern India and beyond. Urdu literary gatherings and other Islamicate traditions inherited from Mughal times helped animate the networks sustaining institutions like scholarly libraries and satirical newspapers. Meanwhile, English-educated lawyers sought to bring new prominence to their city and region by making Patna the capital of a new province. They succeeded, but as Patna's political influence grew, its distinctive character was diminished. Ultimately, Provincial Metropolis shows, Patna's intellectual and cultural life thrived not despite its provinciality but because of it. * David Boyk is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University, where he teaches courses in Hindi-Urdu language and literature, and on South Asian literature, film, and history more broadly. My scholarly interests are focused on South Asia and include urban and regional history, film, food studies,and the history of language and literature. You can learn more about him on his website.  * Saumya Dadoo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her dissertation focuses on the history of law, policing, and punishment in colonial Allahabad.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes led more than 200,000 Huguenots to flee France after 1685. Many settled close to the country's frontiers, where their leaders published apologetic texts arguing for their right to return to France and be recognized as French citizens. By framing their refugee experiences intentionally, even using the term "refugee" to describe their diaspora, Huguenots profoundly influenced Enlightenment debates on citizenship and religious tolerance.  Write to Return: Huguenot Refugees on the Frontiers of the French Enlightenment (McGill-Queen's, 2024) is a cultural history of these Huguenot apologetics in which Bryan Banks examines the work of four authors: Pierre Jurieu, Pierre Bayle, Antoine Court, and Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne. Each author advanced his arguments using key ideas of the Enlightenment, appealing to reason to argue for freedom of conscience all while appealing to emotion in his descriptions of Huguenot victimhood. The authors' campaign succeeded. In 1789, France's revolutionary National Assembly granted repatriation to all expelled Huguenots, offering them citizenship regardless of place of birth or baptism, and even permitting them to reclaim ancestral lands.  International refugees played an overlooked role in shaping discourse around the nation and nationalism in the eighteenth century. Write to Return shows how early modern refugees could advocate for their interests, build international networks, and even craft a new collective identity. By presenting themselves as loyal citizens of France, Huguenots were at the forefront of constructing a French national identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

It is common to define Europe by its democratic, scientific, religious, and cultural traditions. But in What is European? On Overcoming Colonial and Romantic Modes of Thought (Amsterdam UP, 2025), Dag Nikolaus Hasse argues that the search for Europe's essence has taken a troubling turn. He shows that many traditional ideas about Europe are culturally one-sided and historically and geographically distorted, and calls for a decolonisation and deromanticisation of the discourse on Europe. The book promotes an inclusive vision of Europe that reflects its long history of multiethnic cities, offers a cultural home to a wider range of people across the continent, and extends attention and respect to other continents, thus laying a more respectful foundation for shaping the future together.At the same time, Hasse demonstrates that overcoming colonial ways of thinking does not and should not result in anti-Europeanism. Criticising European arrogance may well go hand in hand with feeling culturally at home in other traditions of Europe. For this, it does not matter whether one is a resident of the European continent or not. There is no privileged access to European culture or to the culture of any other continent. Dag Nikolaus Hasse is professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Würzburg. Among his numerous publications, two monographs stand out: Avicenna's De Anima in the Latin West (2000), and Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance (2016). In 2016, Hasse was awarded the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the highest disctinction for a scientist in Germany. 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/intellectual-history

In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it. Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History. 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/intellectual-history

The word “metaphysics” conjures up thoughts of very hard questions about reality and deep, perhaps unresolvable, metaphysical mysteries. But is that the right way to think about the subject matter of metaphysics? According to Amie Thomasson, very clearly no. In her new book, Rethinking Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2025), Thomasson argues that traditional views of metaphysics make the mistake of assuming that our concepts all function the same way – for example, that the job of metaphysics is to provide truthmakers for statements about necessity and possibility, about morality, about numbers, when each of these discourses have different aims. Thomasson, who is Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College, instead offers a deflationary view of metaphysics in which the job of metaphysicians is conceptual engineering – of figuring out how our concepts and terms work in a discourse, what their various functions are, and what conceptual schemes we should adopt, particularly if our current ones are leading us into metaphysical pseudo-problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

How do you know the nature of another person: who she is, or what she is capable of? In four exploratory essays, a seasoned historian examines the mechanisms by which ancient people came to have knowledge—not of the world and its myriad processes but about something more intimate, namely the individuals they encountered in close quarters, those they knew in everyday life. Tracing previously unfathomed structures beneath the surface of late ancient Christianity, Ellen Muehlberger reveals surprising insights about the ancient world and, by extension, the modern. Things Unseen holds treasures for scholars of early Christian studies, for historians in general, and for all those who wonder about how we know what we seem to know. The book is open access. Ellen Muehlberger is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. You can find many of the other essays mentioned in the show here. She is also the editor of The Journal of Early Christian Studies. Michael Motia teaches in the department of 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/intellectual-history

In her scintillating new book, The Beauty of the Houri: Heavenly Virgins, Feminine Ideals (Oxford UP, 2021), Nerina Rustomji presents a fascinating and multilayered intellectual and cultural history of the category of the “Houri” and the multiple ideological projects in which it has been inserted over time and space. Nimbly moving between a vast range of discursive theaters including Western Islamophobic representations of the Houri in the post 9/11 context, early modern and modern French and English Literature, premodern Muslim intellectual traditions, and popular preachers on the internet, Rustomji shows the complexity of this category and its unavailability for a canonical definition. The Beauty of the Houri is intellectual history at its best that combines philological rigor with astute theoretical reflection. And all this Rustomji accomplishes in prose the delightfulness of which competes fiercely with its lucidity. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Explores forgotten solidarity with African liberation struggles through the life of Black Chicagoan Prexy Nesbitt. For many civil rights activists, the Vietnam War brought the dangers of US imperialism and the global nature of antiracist struggle into sharp relief. Martha Biondi tells the story of one such group of activists who built an internationalist movement in Chicago committed to liberation everywhere but especially to ending colonialism and apartheid in Africa. Among their leaders was Prexy Nesbitt. Steeped from an early age in stories of Garveyism and labor militancy, Nesbitt was powerfully influenced by his encounters with the exiled African radicals he met in Dar es Salaam, London, and across the United States. Operating domestically and abroad, Nesbitt's cohort worked closely with opponents of Portuguese and white minority rule in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. Rather than promoting a US conception of Black self-determination, they took ideas from African anticolonial leaders and injected them into US foreign policy debates. The biography of a man but even more so of a movement, We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation (U California Press, 2025) reveals the underappreciated influence of a transformative Black solidarity project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI acting director Eli Karetny speaks with Alex Priou, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Austin, about how technology and ideology shape the modern soul. From Machiavelli's “dikes and dams” to Odysseus's struggle against the Sirens, Priou traces how modernity's drive for control has left us materially fulfilled yet spiritually impoverished. The conversation explores liberalism's crises, the moral stakes of AI, the American “technological republic,” and why revisiting Homer and Plato may be key to recovering wisdom and restraint in an age of restless innovation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

While decolonization liberated territories, it left the root causes of historical injustice unaddressed. Governance change did not address past wrongs and transferred injustice through political and financial architectures. In Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment (Bristol University Press/Policy Press, 2024) Dr. Joshua Castellino presents a five-point plan aimed at system redress through reparations that addresses the colonially induced climate crisis through equitable and sustainable means. In highlighting the structural legacy of colonial crimes, Dr. Castellino provides insights into the complexities of contemporary societies, showing how legal frameworks could foster a fairer, more just 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/intellectual-history

One of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three decades. Our era is one of sexual upheaval. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, school systems across the country are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and the notion of a “tradwife” is gaining adherents on the right while polyamory wins converts on the left. It may seem as though debates over sex are more intense than ever, but as acclaimed historian Rebecca L. Davis demonstrates in Fierce Desires, we should not be too surprised, because Americans have been arguing over which kinds of sex are “acceptable”—and which are not—since before the founding itself.  From the public floggings of fornicators in early New England to passionate same-sex love affairs in the 1800s and the crackdown on abortion providers in the 1870s, and from the movements for sexual liberation to the recent restrictions on access to gender affirming care, Davis presents a sweeping, engrossing, illuminating four-hundred-year account of this nation's sexual past. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including legal records, erotica, and eighteenth-century romance novels, she recasts important episodes—Anthony Comstock's crusade against smut among them—and, at the same time, unearths stories of little-remembered pioneers and iconoclasts, such as an indentured servant in colonial Virginia named Thomas/Thomasine Hall, Gay Liberation Front cofounder Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and postwar female pleasure activist Betty Dodson.  At the heart of the book is Davis's argument that the concept of sexual identity is relatively novel, first appearing in the nineteenth century. Over the centuries, Americans have shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as reflections of personal preferences or values, such as those rooted in faith or culture, to defining sexuality as an essential part of what makes a person who they are. And at every step, legislators, police, activists, and bureaucrats attempted to regulate new sexual behaviors, transforming government in the process. The most comprehensive account of America's sexual past since John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman's 1988 classic, Intimate Matters, Davis's magisterial work seeks to help us understand the turmoil of the present. It demonstrates how fiercely we have always valued our desires, and how far we are willing to go to defend them. Rebecca L. Davis is professor of History and of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware where she held the Miller Family Endowed Early Career Professorship. She is the author of several books including Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics and More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss and is one of the co-founders and co-hosts of the podcast This is Probably a Weird Question about bodies, sexuality, health and history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Do competitive elections secure democracy, or might they undermine it by breeding popular disillusionment with liberal norms and procedures? The so-called Italian School of Elitism, comprising Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels, voiced this very concern. They feared that defining democracy exclusively through representative practices creates unrealistic expectations of what elections can achieve, generating mass demoralization and disillusionment with popular government. The Italian School's concern has gone unheeded, even as their elite theory has been foundational for political science in the United States. Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science (Harvard UP, 2025) argues that scholars have misinterpreted the Italians as conservative, antidemocratic figures who championed the equation of democracy with representative practices to restrain popular participation in politics. Natasha Piano contends not only that the Italian School's thought has been distorted but also that theorists have ignored its main objective: to contain demagogues and plutocrats who prey on the cynicism of the masses. We ought to view these thinkers not as elite theorists of democracy but as democratic theorists of elitism. The Italian School's original writings do not reject electoral politics; they emphasize the power and promise of democracy beyond the ballot. Elections undoubtedly are an essential component of functioning democracies, but in order to preserve their legitimacy we must understand their true capacities and limitations. It is past time to dispel the delusion that we need only elections to solve political crises, or else mass publics, dissatisfied with the status quo, will fall deeper into the arms of authoritarians who capture and pervert formal democratic institutions to serve their own ends. Natasha Piano is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. She specializes in democratic theory and the history of political thought, focusing on the realist and empirical traditions in political science and Italian political theory 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/intellectual-history

This Is Not My World: Art and Public Spaces in Socialist Zagreb (U Minnesota Press, 2024) examines the Group of Six Authors—a collective of young artists who staged provocative art events in the public spaces of socialist Yugoslavia during the 1970s and early 1980s. The book analyses how these spaces, which had long been forums of state ideological control, were transformed into a contested terrain in which personal creativity and new identities could emerge. Drawing on artist interviews and extensive documentation, Adair Rounthwaite situates the Group's work within broader developments in conceptualism and avant-garde theory in the second half of the 20th century, offering a richly detailed account of this fascinating episode in global art history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis. Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, in Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570–1914 (University of Arizona Press, 2025) historian Dr. Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world. Dr. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century. This work traces how scientific intellectuals studied and debated what it meant to know and claim the flora that sprang from Mexican soil—ranging from individual plants to forests and vegetated landscapes—and the importance they placed on indigeneity. It also points to the short- and long-term consequences of these efforts. Dr. López draws on archival and published sources produced from the sixteenth century through the start of the twentieth century and gives special attention to the use of visual images such as scientific illustrations and landscape art. López employs the term “visualization” in recognition of the degree to which officials, botanists, and draftsmen produced imagery and also how they and others viewed nature. Rooted in Place reveals how scientific endeavors were not just about cataloging flora but were deeply intertwined with the construction of identity and the political landscape at three pivotal moments in Mexican history. 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/intellectual-history

An ecologist in California claimed that the iron laws of nature locked humanity into destroying our environment. This meant that we must take drastic measures to rein in unfettered capitalism and the American habit of overconsumption, lest we deplete our common resources. That argument made Garrett Hardin one of the most influential and celebrated environmentalists to ever live. Yet, he had a tragic view of the world that turned his green dream into a green nightmare. This is the final episode of Cited Podcast's new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). There were a number of works that we pulled from to help us understand this story. If you want to learn more about conservative ecological thought, the population panic, and related themes, we recommend that you read: by Richard Hames and Alex Roberts, The Rise of Eco-Fascism: Climate Change and the Far Right; from Jason Oakes, Garret Hardin's Tragic Sense of Life, a short article on the the ecological models that influenced Hardin; and finally, Thomas Robertson's excellent survey of the population panic of the mid-60s to late-70s, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Roman emperor Julian (r. 361-363 CE) was a man of action and of letters, which he employed in an effort to return the Empire to the light of the pagan gods, and reverse the Christianization of the empire advanced by his uncle Constantine and the sons of Constantine. This enterprise was inspired and guided by his conversion to the Neoplatonic philosophy and radical pagan Hellenism of Iamblichus and his disciples, and promoted by his production of Greek orations, letters, and satires. These works present a coherent vision of the providentially guided history and destiny of Rome as a series of foundations and refoundations enacted by rulers such as Romulus, Numa, and Caesar Augustus. As this book demonstrates, Julian offers an Iamblichean approach to the exegesis of the legends of Rome's founding, the allegories of Plato's dialogues, and myths of his own creation in order to articulate his own role in the refounding of the Empire. Furthermore, argues Jeremy Swist, approaching the wider examination of Julian's imperial self-image on these terms ends up nuancing and challenging common assumptions influenced by the rhetoric of his contemporary proponents. In his reverence for the gods and for philosophy, the emperor's self-construction embraces the identities of a statesman and soldier more than of a philosopher, of a Roman more than a Greek, and of a mere human rather than a semi-divine being. While distancing himself from the ideal models of philosophical virtue and imperial founding that inspire his own actions, he adopts a different set of exemplary figures as mirrors of himself. New Books in Late Antiquity is sponsored by Ancient Jew Review Jeremey Swist is Assistant Professor of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University. Click here for The Symposium of the Caesars, and here for his talk on Julian and Constantinople. His dissertation spotlight from AJR is here. 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/intellectual-history

What do we mean when we talk about antisemitism? A thoughtful, vital new intervention from the award-winning historian. For most of history, antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe's political Right, the province of blood-and-soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom's long-standing suspicion of its Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudo-science. Such threats culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The landscape is very different now, as Mark Mazower argues in On Antisemitism: A Word in History (Penguin Press, 2025). More than four-fifths of the world's Jews now live in Israel and the United States, with the former's military dominance of its region guaranteed by the latter while the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the Left not the Right. Mazower clearly and carefully shows us how we got here, seeking to illuminate rather than blame. Very few words have the punch of ‘antisemitism' and yet no term is more liable to be misunderstood in ways affecting free speech and foreign policy alike. On Antisemitism is a vitally important attempt to draw a line that must be drawn. Mark Mazower is the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx by Michael Lazarus Karl Marx gave us not just a critique of the political economy of capital but a way of confronting the impoverished ethical quality of life we face under capitalism. Interpreting Marx anew as an ethical thinker, Absolute Ethical Life provides crucial resources for understanding how freedom and rational agency are impacted by a social world formed by value under capitalism, with consequences for philosophy today. Michael Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry, placing him in close dialogue with Aristotle and Hegel. Lazarus traces the ethical and political dimensions of Marx's work missed by Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, two of the most profound critics of modern politics and ethics. Ultimately, the book claims that Marx's value-form theory is both a continuation of Aristotelian and Hegelian themes and at the same time his most distinctive theoretical achievement. In this normative interpretation of Marx, Lazarus integrates recent moral philosophy with a historically specific analysis of capitalism as a social form of life. He challenges contemporary political and economic theory to insist that any conception of modern life needs to account for capitalism. With a robust critique of capitalism derived from the determinations of what Marx calls the "form of value," Lazarus argues for an ethical life beyond capital. Michael Lazarus is a Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Political Economy. Before coming to King's College London, he was Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute and a visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. 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: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its preference for practicality has not adopted the most practical, scientific, and innovative system of measurement? Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America (Vanderbilt UP, 2025) by Dr. Hector Vera answers these questions by analyzing the political, economic, and international factors that determined the trajectory of the United States as a nation self-excluded from one of the most successful global technical languages. Using a historical-comparative approach and qualitative analysis of archival material, the book examines the trajectories of American scientists, engineers, politicians, and industrialists from 1787 to 1982, to detail what they wanted to attain and to explain what was actually possible to achieve given the political and economic conditions in which they lived. Yardstick Nation argues that in order to understand the unbreached distance between the United States and the metric system, we must consider the interaction between three structural elements: historical timing, state infrastructural power, and international economic integration. Dr. Vera's systematic look at when and why countries have adopted the metric system shows that its introduction is never casual. In the countries that voluntarily embraced the metric system, this was the result of either deep internal political transformations or momentous changes in the international economy. When the adoption of the metric system is politically driven, it comes as the result of a social revolution, independence war, national unification, or the draft of a new constitution. When it is propelled by economic factors, metrication is part of the efforts of economically stagnant countries to integrate into international markets. 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/intellectual-history

In the world of Black radical politics, the name Audley Moore commands unquestioned respect. Across the nine decades of her life, Queen Mother Moore distinguished herself as a leading progenitor of Black Nationalism, the founder of the modern reparations movement, and, from her Philadelphia and Harlem homes, a mentor to some of America's most influential Black activists.And yet, she is far less remembered than many of her peers and protégés—Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ahmad, to name just a few—and the ephemera of her life are either lost or plundered. In Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore (Pantheon, 2025), celebrated writer and historian Ashley D. Farmer restores Moore's faded portrait, delivering the first ever definitive account of her life and enduring legacy.Deeply researched and richly detailed, Queen Mother is more than just the biography of an American icon. It's a narrative history of 20th-century Black radicalism, told through the lens of the woman whose grit and determination sustained the movement. Omari Averette-Phillips is a PhD candidate in History & African American Studies at UC-Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Indian Alchemy: Sources and Contexts (Oxford UP, 2025) serves to expand readers' understanding of what it meant to practice alchemy on the Indian subcontinent. With its broad selection of examined themes, this collection offers a detailed and comprehensive investigation of the Indian alchemical idiom and the beliefs and practices of its practitioners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers (UVA Press, 2025) explores the local dynamics, national connections, and global context of the Black freedom movement in Harlem from 1954 to 1964, illuminating how activists, organizers, and ordinary people mounted their resistance to systemic racism in the Jim Crow North. The richness of Black radical thought and action in this period made Harlem a key battleground in the national civil rights movement, transformed local Black grassroots politics, and facilitated the rise of Black Power in New York City. At the same time, the city's attempts to clamp down on activists revealed the repressive nature of Northern liberalism and heralded the expansion of the carceral state. Peter Blackmer argues that this decade of confrontations between Black communities and white state power caused Harlem residents and activists to seek “new means” for achieving freedom within a city, state, and nation determined to deny it. Tracing the dual evolution of Black radicalism and white resistance, Unleashing Black Power offers a new framework for analyzing the epochal urban uprisings in the 1960s. Guest: Peter Blackmer (he/him) is an associate professor of Africology and African American Studies at Eastern Michigan University and his research and teaching explore the ways in which Black-led grassroots organizing campaigns for self-determination in the 20th and 21st Century United States have shaped local and national politics through struggles for civil rights, human rights, and political power in American cities. Host: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

How should one live? What should one do? And what do these questions have to do with being a good person? In Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demine of the Modern Moral Self (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Ladelle McWhorter reorients these questions through a genealogy of the concept of personhood. That genealogy is in the service of showing us not only that personhood is historically contingent, but that it is also optional. In unbecoming persons, we can feel relief, vital belonging, and exhilaration. We can also embrace an ethos of active belonging, a mode of living that eschews the trappings of personhood for the possibilities of life together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

What does it mean to be a political subject? This is one of the key questions asked by Massimo Modonesi in ​The Antagonistic Principle: Marxism and Political Action (2019)​, published as part of the Historical Materialism book series from Brill and Haymarket books. The book takes on the theories of Marx and Gramsci to develop a philosophical triad of subalternity-antagonism-autonomy as a way of studying political subjectification under oppressive conditions and the potential for resistance. The book then looks at political developments in South and Latin America, trying to understand the underlying dynamics of both where it's coming from, and what its possibilities are for anticapitalist resistance. Massimo Modonesi is professor and chair of the Political and Social Sciences Faculty at the Autonomous National University in Mexico, and is the author of numerous books on political theory and history in Latin America, his most recent in English being ​Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy: Constructing the Political Subject.​ He is a member of the coordinating committee of the International Gramsci Society. Maria Vignau served as a research assistant under Modonesi, and now teaches while working on her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Between 1095 and 1100, epistles sustained social relationships across the Mediterranean and within Europe, as a mixture of historical writing, literary invention, news, and theological interpretation. They served ecclesiastical administration, projected authority, and formed focal points for spiritual commemoration and para-liturgical campaigns. Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Dr. Thomas Smith, is grounded on extensive research into the original manuscripts, and presents numerous new manuscript witnesses. The book argues that some of the letters are post hoc “inventions”, composed by generations of scribe-readers who visited crusading sites from the twelfth century on, adding new layers of meaning in the form of interpolations and post-scripts. Drawing upon this new understanding, and blurring the distinction of epistolary “reality”, it rewrites central aspects of the history of the First Crusade, considering the documents in a new way: as markers of enthusiasm and support for the crusade movement among monastic clergy, who copied and consumed them as a form of scribal crusading. Whether authentic letters or literary “confections”, they functioned as communal sites for the celebration, commemoration and memorialisation of the expedition. 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/intellectual-history

Does good democratic government require intelligent, moral, and productive citizens? Can our political institutions educate the kind of citizens we wish or need to have? With recent arguments "against democracy" and fears about the rise of populism, there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. Some even question whether democracy is worth saving. In Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage (Oxford UP, 2024), Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Englert shows how nineteenth-century French liberals championed the idea of "political capacity" as an alternative to democratic political rights and argued that voting rights should be limited to capable citizens who would preserve free, stable institutions against revolutionary passions and democratic demands. Liberals also redefined democracy itself, from its ancient meaning as political rule by the people to something that, counterintuitively, demanded the guidance of a capable few rather than the rule of all.Understandably, scholarly treatments of political capacity have criticized the idea as exclusionary and potentially dangerous. Englert argues instead that political capacity was a flexible standard that developed alongside a changing society and economy, allowing liberals to embrace democracy without abandoning their first principles. She reveals a forgotten, uncharted path of liberalism in France that remained open to political democracy while aiming to foster citizen capacity. Overall, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their notion of the "new democracy" to resist universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors' antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them. Gianna Englert is Associate Professor of Humanities in The Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. 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/intellectual-history