Podcasts about texas press

Modern sports did not just change how people played; they fundamentally rewired how they lived, looked, and identified within a rapidly transforming world. The conversation with Murat Yildiz, an assosciate professor of history at Skidmore College, explores the high-stakes intersection of physical culture, social status, and the 19th-century quest for a new global aesthetic. Elite educational and military institutions utilized gymnastics and disciplined exercise to mold an upwardly mobile generation, using sports to reconfigure traditional social hierarchies. Meanwhile, the rise of photography helped normalize and spread a uniform corporal aesthetic, allowing young men from diverse backgrounds to adopt a standardized look of proper modern masculinity. Tracing a vibrant athletic awakening, the discussion follows how sporting culture rippled across urban centers, from Istanbul to Cairo, Beirut, and Jerusalem, signaling a deeper transformation in community, selfhood, and the shift from indigenous traditions to professionalized international play.   0:00 Introduction 1:39 Misconceptions of Athletics and Modernity 4:07 Professionalism vs. Amateurism in Regional Sporting Culture 8:41 Sports as a Tool for Capturing Urban Diversity 9:17 Educational Reformers and the Significance of Gymnastics 12:47 Sports as a New Modern Technology 18:53 Photography and the Global Corporal Aesthetic 21:56 Visual Normalization of Ethnic and Religious Identities 23:14 Sports and the Creation of New Militaries 26:13 Reconfiguring Class Hierarchies in Elite Schools 30:41 Spreading Western Sports: From Baseball to Soccer 32:21 Tension with Indigenous Traditions: The Case of Wrestling 36:40 Gendering the Ottoman World of Sports 41:04 Tracing the Regional Sports Nahda beyond the Capital 48:07 History as a Creative Conversation with the Past 52:02 Al Abtal Magazine and the Egyptian Physical Culture 56:53 Further Recommendations: Football, Books, and Film 1:01:56 Future Directions for Archival Research   Murat C. Yildiz is Associate Professor of History at Skidmore College. He specializes in the cultural and social history of the modern Middle East. In particular, his research examines the intersections of sports, identity, the body, gender, and intercommunality in the late Ottoman Empire. His book, "The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul" (The University of Texas Press), examines how Istanbul's Muslim, Christian, and Jewish denizens created a shared sports culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is an assistant editor for the Arab Studies Journal and serves as an editorial board member of the International Journal of the History of Sport. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles and served as a Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Michigan.   Connect with Murat C. Yildiz

How does coloniality shape the sociosomatic possibilities of our bodies? More importantly, how do gender-nonconforming people not only resist the limitations of that coloniality but also make, connect to, and revitalize other possibilities? How do displaced people use old and radical practices of embodiment to enact decolonial life now? In Sideways Selves: Travesti and Joetría Struggles Across the Américas (U Texas Press, 2025), PJ DiPietro listens carefully across many registers to the creative work of making and living sideways selves. Their work offers paths to decolonial worlds we may need to develop new eyes to see. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

How does coloniality shape the sociosomatic possibilities of our bodies? More importantly, how do gender-nonconforming people not only resist the limitations of that coloniality but also make, connect to, and revitalize other possibilities? How do displaced people use old and radical practices of embodiment to enact decolonial life now? In Sideways Selves: Travesti and Joetría Struggles Across the Américas (U Texas Press, 2025), PJ DiPietro listens carefully across many registers to the creative work of making and living sideways selves. Their work offers paths to decolonial worlds we may need to develop new eyes to see. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

How does coloniality shape the sociosomatic possibilities of our bodies? More importantly, how do gender-nonconforming people not only resist the limitations of that coloniality but also make, connect to, and revitalize other possibilities? How do displaced people use old and radical practices of embodiment to enact decolonial life now? In Sideways Selves: Travesti and Joetría Struggles Across the Américas (U Texas Press, 2025), PJ DiPietro listens carefully across many registers to the creative work of making and living sideways selves. Their work offers paths to decolonial worlds we may need to develop new eyes to see. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

How does coloniality shape the sociosomatic possibilities of our bodies? More importantly, how do gender-nonconforming people not only resist the limitations of that coloniality but also make, connect to, and revitalize other possibilities? How do displaced people use old and radical practices of embodiment to enact decolonial life now? In Sideways Selves: Travesti and Joetría Struggles Across the Américas (U Texas Press, 2025), PJ DiPietro listens carefully across many registers to the creative work of making and living sideways selves. Their work offers paths to decolonial worlds we may need to develop new eyes to see. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

How does coloniality shape the sociosomatic possibilities of our bodies? More importantly, how do gender-nonconforming people not only resist the limitations of that coloniality but also make, connect to, and revitalize other possibilities? How do displaced people use old and radical practices of embodiment to enact decolonial life now? In Sideways Selves: Travesti and Joetría Struggles Across the Américas (U Texas Press, 2025), PJ DiPietro listens carefully across many registers to the creative work of making and living sideways selves. Their work offers paths to decolonial worlds we may need to develop new eyes to see. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

#WillDodson #Comebacks #Gloria Monti #MitchHamptonInside this episode with your host, Mitch Hampton:I enjoyed the discussion with Will Dodson so much that I had to have him back for a second episode. I think this might be one of the few podcast episodes wherein we mention figures as varied as Jimmy Stewart, Woody Strode, John Ford, Chuck Vincent, Gloria Swanson, Fred Olen Ray, Wes Craven and Pam Grier, but that is the kind of thing that can happen when Will and I come into contact. Not only was I happy that Gloria Monti brought the wonderful book that is Comebacks: The Return of the Aging Film Star (Wayne State UP, 2025) into our world that she co-edited with Martin Shinglerand. They bring the story of artists like Woody Strode to future generations but I can't help but feel that, speaking philosophically, the subject or concept of the comeback itself might be one that is most integral to all of the arts in any age. I hope you share in our enthusiasm on this one.Will's Bio and Links:Will Dodson is a writer and editor; film, rhetoric, and literature professor; audio commentary and visual essay producer .He is a Lecturer of Media Studies and co-editor of The Anthem Series on Exploitation and Industry in World Cinema, Foundations of Horror Studies (Manchester UP), and American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (University of Texas Press). His most recent essays are “One Thing About Time:' Woody Strode's Late Films,” included in Comebacks: The Return of the Aging Film Star (Wayne State UP, 2025)Links to Will's Social Media and works:LinkTree: @linktr.ee/willdodsonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wdodson52/Amazon Author Page ( link embedded)Additional links:Series Co-editor, The Anthem Series on Exploitation and Industry in World CinemaSeries Co-editor, Foundations of Horror StudiesCo-editor, American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper#cinema #television #johnford #western #spaghettiwestern #expolitationmovie #blackploitation #pamgreir #jimmystewart #willaimholden #gloriaswanson #sunsetboulevard #billywider #silentmovie #1920s #1930s #1940s #1950s #1960s #1970s #1980s #1990s #directtovideo  #vhs #compactdisc #computer #bodymodification #lifeextension #genetics #race #civilrights #nativeamerican #indigenous #italy #horror #gothic #erotica #screamqueen #jimwynorski #jewelshepard #juliestrain #shannontweed #genesimmons #howardberger #bluray #restoration #jade #williamfriedkin #davidcaruso #lindafiorentino #eroticthriller #blackpanther #blackpanthers #fredwilliamson #jimbrown #jimkelly #larrycohen #joedante #jonathandemme #jonathankaplan #rogercorman #theater #thirdplace #jackiebrown #quentintarantino #robertforster #johntravolta #jackhill #claudiajennings #gatorbait #francisfordcoppola #stanleykubrick #spartacus #gorevidal #howardfast #plutarch #daltontrumbo #kirkdouglas #laurenceolivier #tonycurtis #jeansimmons #lisakudrow #hbomax #stream #sports #football #integration

Episode 112 In the finale of Shockwaves: The 1947 Texas City Explosion, we examine the aftermath of one of the deadliest industrial disasters in American history—and the devastating questions that followed. Why didn't the firefighters, longshoremen, and citizens of Texas City understand the danger they were facing? Who did understand the risks of ammonium nitrate? And how did knowledge of those dangers fail to reach the people whose lives depended on it? In this episode, we trace the history of ammonium nitrate from wartime explosive to postwar fertilizer, explore how critical safety knowledge became fragmented after World War II, and break down the landmark legal battle that followed the disaster: Dalehite v. United States. We also examine the Federal Tort Claims Act, the government's controversial defense before the Supreme Court, and the chilling realization that the Texas City disaster may have been entirely preventable. This is the conclusion of our three-part series on the 1947 Texas City disaster. CHECK OUT MY NEW AUTHOR WEBSITE: www.anauthornamedapril.com The Crime to Burn Patreon - The Cult of Steve - is LIVE NOW! Go join and get all the unhinged you can handle. Click here to be sanctified.  Inner Sanctum Acknowledgments: Eternal gratitude to our Inner Sanctum patrons, Melanie Curtis, Jenny Mercer, Laura Pisciotta, and Jason Wolfe for helping us bring light to the stories others would rather leave in the ashes. Listener discretion is advised. Background music by Not Notoriously Coordinated  Get your Crime to Burn Merch! https://crimetoburn.myspreadshop.com Please follow us on Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok and Youtube for the latest news on this case. You can email us at crimetoburn@gmail.com We welcome any constructive feedback and would greatly appreciate a 5 star rating and review.  If you need a way to keep your canine contained, you can also support the show by purchasing a Pawious wireless dog fence using our affiliate link and use the code "crimetoburn" at checkout to receive 10% off. Pawious, because our dog Winston needed a radius, not a rap sheet.  SOURCES: Stephens, Hugh W. The Texas City Disaster, 1947. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Minutaglio, Bill. City on Fire: The Explosion That Devastated a Texas Town and Ignited a Historic Legal Battle. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. International Association of Fire Chiefs. The Texas City Disaster. National Hazardous Materials Fusion Center Hazmat History. https://www.iafc.org/docs/default-source/1haz/hazmat_history_texas_city_disaster.pdf Fire Prevention and Engineering Bureau of Texas and National Board of Fire Underwriters. Texas City, Texas Disaster Report. https://www.local1259iaff.org/report.htm Havel, Gregory. “Texas City Disaster.” Fire Engineering, October 6, 2008. https://dam.clarionengage.com/downloads.pennnet.com/fe/misc/20081006havel_texascity.pdf Ross, Cheryl Lauersdorf. “The 1947 Texas City Disaster: Changing Lives in a Heartbeat.” Houston History Magazine, vol. 15, no. 1. https://houstonhistorymagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Texas-City-Disaster.pdf

Bryce Henson joins the pod to discuss his book Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip Hop in Brazil (University of Texas Press, 2023). Drawing on ethnographic research in Salvador da Bahia, Henson explores Brazilian hip hop as a diasporic cultural and political movement rooted in Black radical traditions, anti-racist struggle, and collective community formation. Throughout the conversation, the group discusses the historical significance of quilombos in Brazil, the relationship between Blackness and political struggle, the role of hip hop as a form of "quilombismo," and the intersections of race, class, gender, and diaspora in contemporary Brazil. Bryce Henson is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University, with affiliations in Africana Studies and the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute. He is also an affiliated researcher with the Pós-Afro Program at the Universidade Federal da Bahia and serves as Associate Editor for Transforming Anthropology. Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip Hop in Brazil can be purchased here: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477327986/ Spotify Playlist Curated by Bryce Henson: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3KnR3IBULZ9aAesr8pY3Ov?si=wp_fX5SwSnigAXai5nWT6Q    Subscribe to Latin American Perspectives A journal for discussion and debate on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas. https://latinamericanperspectives.com/

On this episode, Marc talks with Caryn Rose, author of Why Patti Smith Matters, published by the University of Texas Press, and Three Chords and Blessed Noise: A Patti Smith Tour Chronicle, a chapbook released on her own Till Victory Press imprint. The former is part biography, part memoir of Smith fandom, and part critical analysis of Smith's work and life. The latter is a tour diary that Rose wrote when she went to four Smith concerts held in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Smith's debut album Horses in November of 2025.Taken together, these books paint a portrait of Smith as a vital artist but also a devoted worker, someone who never stops putting time and energy into her art. Rose herself has been a writer for many decades, so she knows what it's like to treat creativity as a job, and it makes her insights about Smith particularly sharp.As Rose writes in Why Patti Smith Matters, "This is not a biography and this is not a hagiography. This is a book about Patti Smith's work, because it is her work that matters, and because of that work and the value that she places on her labor within the creative process."We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Caryn Rose!

Episode 111 As Texas City struggles to respond to one of the deadliest industrial disasters in American history, chaos spreads across the burning waterfront. With the entire volunteer fire department wiped out in the first blast, civilians, medical workers, military personnel, and rescue crews are forced to improvise a disaster response in real time while rumors, chemical fires, and mass casualties overwhelm the city. But sitting just yards from the wreckage of the Grandcamp is another ship loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer: the High Flyer. In Part 2 of Shockwaves: The 1947 Texas City Explosion, we follow the fragmented and increasingly desperate efforts to understand the danger still lurking in the harbor—and the catastrophic failures, misunderstandings, and expert reassurances that would lead Texas City toward a second devastating explosion. CHECK OUT MY NEW AUTHOR WEBSITE: www.anauthornamedapril.com The Crime to Burn Patreon - The Cult of Steve - is LIVE NOW! Go join and get all the unhinged you can handle. Click here to be sanctified.  Inner Sanctum Acknowledgments: Eternal gratitude to our Inner Sanctum patrons, Melanie Curtis, Jenny Mercer, Laura Pisciotta, and Jason Wolfe for helping us bring light to the stories others would rather leave in the ashes. Listener discretion is advised. Background music by Not Notoriously Coordinated  Get your Crime to Burn Merch! https://crimetoburn.myspreadshop.com Please follow us on Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok and Youtube for the latest news on this case. You can email us at crimetoburn@gmail.com We welcome any constructive feedback and would greatly appreciate a 5 star rating and review.  If you need a way to keep your canine contained, you can also support the show by purchasing a Pawious wireless dog fence using our affiliate link and use the code "crimetoburn" at checkout to receive 10% off. Pawious, because our dog Winston needed a radius, not a rap sheet.  SOURCES: Stephens, Hugh W. The Texas City Disaster, 1947. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Minutaglio, Bill. City on Fire: The Explosion That Devastated a Texas Town and Ignited a Historic Legal Battle. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. International Association of Fire Chiefs. The Texas City Disaster. National Hazardous Materials Fusion Center Hazmat History. https://www.iafc.org/docs/default-source/1haz/hazmat_history_texas_city_disaster.pdf Fire Prevention and Engineering Bureau of Texas and National Board of Fire Underwriters. Texas City, Texas Disaster Report. https://www.local1259iaff.org/report.htm Havel, Gregory. “Texas City Disaster.” Fire Engineering, October 6, 2008. https://dam.clarionengage.com/downloads.pennnet.com/fe/misc/20081006havel_texascity.pdf Ross, Cheryl Lauersdorf. “The 1947 Texas City Disaster: Changing Lives in a Heartbeat.” Houston History Magazine, vol. 15, no. 1. https://houstonhistorymagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Texas-City-Disaster.pdf

Episode 110 On April 16, 1947, a routine morning in Texas City, Texas turned catastrophic when a fire broke out aboard the French cargo ship Grandcamp, which was loaded with thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. As smoke poured from the vessel, onlookers gathered and firefighters responded—unaware of the danger posed by the volatile cargo. Efforts to contain the fire instead intensified the conditions inside the ship, leading to a massive explosion that devastated the port, killed hundreds—including the entire responding fire department—and injured thousands more. The blast triggered widespread destruction, secondary fires, and a cascading disaster that engulfed nearby industrial facilities. In this episode, we examine how a combination of misunderstood chemistry, risky cargo practices, and critical decision-making failures led to one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history—and why the danger wasn't over when the Grandcamp exploded. CHECK OUT MY NEW AUTHOR WEBSITE: www.anauthornamedapril.com The Crime to Burn Patreon - The Cult of Steve - is LIVE NOW! Go join and get all the unhinged you can handle. Click here to be sanctified.  Inner Sanctum Acknowledgments: Eternal gratitude to our Inner Sanctum patrons, Melanie Curtis, Jenny Mercer, Laura Pisciotta, and Jason Wolfe for helping us bring light to the stories others would rather leave in the ashes. Listener discretion is advised. Background music by Not Notoriously Coordinated  Get your Crime to Burn Merch! https://crimetoburn.myspreadshop.com Please follow us on Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok and Youtube for the latest news on this case. You can email us at crimetoburn@gmail.com We welcome any constructive feedback and would greatly appreciate a 5 star rating and review.  If you need a way to keep your canine contained, you can also support the show by purchasing a Pawious wireless dog fence using our affiliate link and use the code "crimetoburn" at checkout to receive 10% off. Pawious, because our dog Winston needed a radius, not a rap sheet.  SOURCES: Stephens, Hugh W. The Texas City Disaster, 1947. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Minutaglio, Bill. City on Fire: The Explosion That Devastated a Texas Town and Ignited a Historic Legal Battle. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. International Association of Fire Chiefs. The Texas City Disaster. National Hazardous Materials Fusion Center Hazmat History. https://www.iafc.org/docs/default-source/1haz/hazmat_history_texas_city_disaster.pdf Fire Prevention and Engineering Bureau of Texas and National Board of Fire Underwriters. Texas City, Texas Disaster Report. https://www.local1259iaff.org/report.htm Havel, Gregory. “Texas City Disaster.” Fire Engineering, October 6, 2008. https://dam.clarionengage.com/downloads.pennnet.com/fe/misc/20081006havel_texascity.pdf Ross, Cheryl Lauersdorf. “The 1947 Texas City Disaster: Changing Lives in a Heartbeat.” Houston History Magazine, vol. 15, no. 1. https://houstonhistorymagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Texas-City-Disaster.pdf

Slushies, you could be forgiven this week for thinking you've tuned in to a different podcast. One about gardening, maybe? Or perhaps you've stumbled across a punctuation pod? But it's just your usual team ranging wherever the poems might take us.    Today we're discussing poems by Annie Kantar. The first, “Wolf Peach,” has us pondering folklore, the toxicity of nightshades, and dreaming of our favorite shakshuka. We draw on Dagne's well of gardening knowledge. The second poem spurs our deep regard for an overlooked punctuation mark with charm and humor. How many ways can you appreciate an apostrophe, that little curve that lets us skip syllables? Lisa cracks open her copy of Edward Hirch's The Essential Poet's Glossary to share a definition. Kathy thinks PBQ readers are similarly language-obsessed and will appreciate the extent of our punctuation celebration.    We end the episode with a cliffhanger. You'll have to keep listening to hear how it all plays out. Sam signs off with a recommendation of the latest from Ben Lerner, Transcription. Join us in offering a big PBQ welcome to our newest co-op, Reese Pfunder! Thanks, as always, for listening.   At the table: Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Reese Pfunder, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer) Author Bio: Annie Kantar is the author of Means to Be Lucky (Poets & Traitors Press), translator of the Book of Job (Koren), and of Leah Goldberg's collection of poems, With This Night (University of Texas Press), which was shortlisted for the ALTA Prize. Her work has appeared in journals such as The American Literary Review, Barrow Street, Bennington Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Forma, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, On the Seawall, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Rattle, Smartish Pace, Tikkun and Verse Daily, and anthologized in Plume Anthology (Canisy Press), The Art of Poetry (Classical Academic Press), and elsewhere.   WOLF PEACH Once deemed capable  of turning people   into monsters, the inside    of the tomato is dark,  no matter how vivid,    how vitamin-rich.   Darkness is everywhere and they say if I open    my eyes to the shadow,    I'll see reality as it is. Even war has its beauty,   cruelty its place;    learn to live with it,  don't be fooled:   the Peach that bursts   in its own sugars, disappearing in cobblers and pies,   could beget a tomato,   and has made horrors of unsuspecting gardeners.    Know its fat blank face,    its bloodthirst, lest you end up like   the Good Egg,    conjurer of casseroles  for funerals and bedsides, that storybook apple   of everyone's eye. All the darkness in the world    surrounds her sunny inside,   but she loses every time. Still the peach is a peach, and the shakshuka shakshuka Mar. 2026, after Aharon Shabtai APOSTROPHE Shape of an ear in the corner  of a word, a speck  frequently misplaced;    signal of elision,  shortcut to what's been said  or couldn't have been   otherwise, a desire for cadence, synonym for address (don't forget where   you're headed), receptacle for a voice, oracle, or friend;  informal; a way of getting    to the point; a getting-of-drift, destination; a means an end a hand's    c'mon, teardrop, side eye;  infinite yet contained, say,  if God were part person    or sea; the sea; syllable skipper,  well-wisher, absent entity, substitute, metonymy    for knowing, a wild guess, an exclamation implicit for is and its opposite. OLD STORY  What was it, the word she loved, what she called the most important thing?  Incapable of saying   whether it continued through th- - - or ended    in a lisping omission,  her grandson my grandfather the doctor    learned to nod: yes, of course, it's all that matters.   She had soft hands, they walked beside it: sometimes it seems no more than a surface    you could walk across, but then you step in    and the water drops off, deeper than you imagined. . .  Whether he was talking about the lake or    her old world accent, I can't say; either way,    you know how it goes—soon it was too late to admit he didn't understand.   Their walks followed the entire circumference,    whose center was that one inscrutable truth  she'd put on repeat, blurred by an inaudible h or e   (or was it an i)? He was a big boy, and by the time       he had to go, as faith or fate would have it, he no longer needed to know.

A possessed child, an ancient demon, and some truly disturbing scenes. In this episode of the Mummy Movie Podcast, we examine Lee Cronin's: The Mummy (2026). As well as reviewing the film, we use it as a jumping off point to delve into the fascinating world of ancient Egyptian evil and demons.Email: mummymoviepodcast@gmail.comPatreon: www.patreon.com/MummyMoviePodcast BibliographyJanak, J. (2013). Akh. UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 1-11.Loprieno, A. (2003). Drei Leben nach dem Tod: wieviele Seelen hatten die alten Ägypter?. Grab und Totenkult im Alten Ägypten, Munich, 200-225.Lucarelli, R. (2008, May). Ancient Egyptian demons. The evidence of the magical and funerary papyri of the New Kingdom and of the Third Intermediate Period'. In Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists: Abstracts of Papers, University of the Aegean (Rhodes, 2008) (pp. 151-152).Lucarelli, R. (2009). Popular beliefs in demons in the Libyan Period: the evidence of the Oracular Amuletic Decrees (pp. 231-240).Lucarelli, R. (2010). Demons (benevolent and malevolent). UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 1(1).Pinch, G. (2003). Ancient Egyptian Magic. University of Texas Press; Univ of Texas PR ed. Edition Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1980, when he was a high-school freshman in Canyon, Texas, Jeff Roche opened up his school newspaper and saw he was one of only seven students out of about 500 who voted for Carter rather than Reagan in that year's mock Presidential election. This was the moment that Roche – now a history professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio – first began to realize that the Texas Panhandle is truly different, with a conservative political culture that distinguishes it even from the rural areas in New Mexico and Oklahoma where he also spent time as a child. That political culture is the subject of Roche's new book, The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right, published in 2025 by the University of Texas Press. Roche joins the podcast for a conversation with WT's Tim Bowman, who notes that the book is not just a political history but an "all-encompassing, sweeping narrative" of the region since permanent settlement began in the late 19th century. Roche and Bowman discuss how this early, frontier period shaped the region's eventual "anti-statist, highly individualized" political commitments; how Roche was able to achieve the incredible level of historical detail in his text; and how Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis" was not only used to explain life in the Southern Plains, one of the last places to be settled in the U.S. (and therefore, according to the thesis, home to the most American of all Americans), but also internalized by generations of local educators, who used the thesis to promote a specific vision of West Texas identity itself. The conversation also touches on the influence and backstory of figures like J. Evetts Haley and "Pappy" O' Daniel (who suggested in 1941 that labor unions were more dangerous to the United States than the Nazis); the role of West Texas State (now West Texas A&M) in shaping the region's culture; and the past, present, and future of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, the state's largest historical museum, which has been closed to the public since early 2025. Roche has been involved in grassroots efforts to re-open the museum, and his own work, as Bowman puts it, is a "clear testament" to the importance of the institution as a resource for those looking to preserve and understand West Texas history.

When thinking about the food and agricultural landscape of Texas, the mind immediately goes to cattle, corn, and cotton—certainly not wheat. But as my guest this week, Dr. Rebecca Sharpless, shares, the region of North Texas had a robust wheat culture from the 1840s until the post-World War Two period. So what made North Texas a great place for wheat? And what are the implications of wheat as culture and cultivator?  Rebecca is here today to talk about her new book, People of the Wheat: Culture and Cultivation in North Texas, out now through Univeristy of Texas Press. She is a professor of history at Texas Christian University, and writes on food, labour, and women. She is also the author of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, and Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South.   In today's conversation, we're exploring the forgotten history of wheat harvesting in North Texas, including how it complicates the story of plantation economies and enslavement histories in the south, the profound impact of mechanization on milling and distributing wheat, and the post-war influences that led to wheat's decline, despite having lasting cultural importance for Western appetites and baking.  Resources:  People of the Wheat book Rebecca's university website 

Caryn Rose's Three Chords and Blessed Noise (2026) is an ode to the lost art of the tour diary. In November of 2025, Patti Smith and her band embarked on a short tour in the United States and Europe to commemorate this auspicious occasion and to allow us, the children of this particular revolution, to celebrate this achievement, these songs and these people. Rose headed off for a week of shows: Chicago, New York City, and Boston. One more time. Maybe one last time. As someone whose writing career has focused on rock and roll in its live form, and who spent several years researching and writing a book about Patti Smith (Why Patti Smith Matters, University of Texas Press, 2022), she felt this anniversary outing needed to be captured for posterity.  Rose didn't want to write yet something else that would get lost on the World Wide Web, she didn't want to be limited by word count, and she wanted something tangible. This is the end result. Less than a book, more than a zine. Caryn Rose is a music journalist and writer. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Caryn Rose's Three Chords and Blessed Noise (2026) is an ode to the lost art of the tour diary. In November of 2025, Patti Smith and her band embarked on a short tour in the United States and Europe to commemorate this auspicious occasion and to allow us, the children of this particular revolution, to celebrate this achievement, these songs and these people. Rose headed off for a week of shows: Chicago, New York City, and Boston. One more time. Maybe one last time. As someone whose writing career has focused on rock and roll in its live form, and who spent several years researching and writing a book about Patti Smith (Why Patti Smith Matters, University of Texas Press, 2022), she felt this anniversary outing needed to be captured for posterity.  Rose didn't want to write yet something else that would get lost on the World Wide Web, she didn't want to be limited by word count, and she wanted something tangible. This is the end result. Less than a book, more than a zine. Caryn Rose is a music journalist and writer. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Caryn Rose's Three Chords and Blessed Noise (2026) is an ode to the lost art of the tour diary. In November of 2025, Patti Smith and her band embarked on a short tour in the United States and Europe to commemorate this auspicious occasion and to allow us, the children of this particular revolution, to celebrate this achievement, these songs and these people. Rose headed off for a week of shows: Chicago, New York City, and Boston. One more time. Maybe one last time. As someone whose writing career has focused on rock and roll in its live form, and who spent several years researching and writing a book about Patti Smith (Why Patti Smith Matters, University of Texas Press, 2022), she felt this anniversary outing needed to be captured for posterity.  Rose didn't want to write yet something else that would get lost on the World Wide Web, she didn't want to be limited by word count, and she wanted something tangible. This is the end result. Less than a book, more than a zine. Caryn Rose is a music journalist and writer. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Caryn Rose's Three Chords and Blessed Noise (2026) is an ode to the lost art of the tour diary. In November of 2025, Patti Smith and her band embarked on a short tour in the United States and Europe to commemorate this auspicious occasion and to allow us, the children of this particular revolution, to celebrate this achievement, these songs and these people. Rose headed off for a week of shows: Chicago, New York City, and Boston. One more time. Maybe one last time. As someone whose writing career has focused on rock and roll in its live form, and who spent several years researching and writing a book about Patti Smith (Why Patti Smith Matters, University of Texas Press, 2022), she felt this anniversary outing needed to be captured for posterity.  Rose didn't want to write yet something else that would get lost on the World Wide Web, she didn't want to be limited by word count, and she wanted something tangible. This is the end result. Less than a book, more than a zine. Caryn Rose is a music journalist and writer. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Caryn Rose's Three Chords and Blessed Noise (2026) is an ode to the lost art of the tour diary. In November of 2025, Patti Smith and her band embarked on a short tour in the United States and Europe to commemorate this auspicious occasion and to allow us, the children of this particular revolution, to celebrate this achievement, these songs and these people. Rose headed off for a week of shows: Chicago, New York City, and Boston. One more time. Maybe one last time. As someone whose writing career has focused on rock and roll in its live form, and who spent several years researching and writing a book about Patti Smith (Why Patti Smith Matters, University of Texas Press, 2022), she felt this anniversary outing needed to be captured for posterity.  Rose didn't want to write yet something else that would get lost on the World Wide Web, she didn't want to be limited by word count, and she wanted something tangible. This is the end result. Less than a book, more than a zine. Caryn Rose is a music journalist and writer. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Ken Chitwood's Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam (University of Texas Press, 2025), uses rich ethnographic fieldwork across multiple cities and the digital space to capture the complex lived realities of Puerto Rican Muslims both on the island and in the United States. The study is attuned to the archipelago's context that accents Puerto Rican Islam, such as through histories that link it to Andalusian Spain, and culture, especially through foodscapes. Puerto Rico also has a diverse Arab Muslim diasporic population, especially Palestinians. Due to this diversity of Muslim experiences, throughout the book there emerge conversations about the boundaries of Islam in relation to culture, ethnicity, and theology. At times, when these varied communities share ritual and communal space together, questions of authenticity unfold, such as over language or notions of piety. Despite moments of tension around tribalism and questions of legitimacy, we learn that often Islam for both these communities is understood through their experiences of colonialism, and so anti-colonial registers of Islam influence the solidarity building and social justice organizing that unites Puerto Rican and Palestinian Muslims. The book also has an accompanying Spotify playlist that you definitely should check out. This book will be of interest to anyone working on Islam in South America and/or North America, and Arab and Palestinian diasporic studies, and food studies. Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen's University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Ken Chitwood's Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam (University of Texas Press, 2025), uses rich ethnographic fieldwork across multiple cities and the digital space to capture the complex lived realities of Puerto Rican Muslims both on the island and in the United States. The study is attuned to the archipelago's context that accents Puerto Rican Islam, such as through histories that link it to Andalusian Spain, and culture, especially through foodscapes. Puerto Rico also has a diverse Arab Muslim diasporic population, especially Palestinians. Due to this diversity of Muslim experiences, throughout the book there emerge conversations about the boundaries of Islam in relation to culture, ethnicity, and theology. At times, when these varied communities share ritual and communal space together, questions of authenticity unfold, such as over language or notions of piety. Despite moments of tension around tribalism and questions of legitimacy, we learn that often Islam for both these communities is understood through their experiences of colonialism, and so anti-colonial registers of Islam influence the solidarity building and social justice organizing that unites Puerto Rican and Palestinian Muslims. The book also has an accompanying Spotify playlist that you definitely should check out. This book will be of interest to anyone working on Islam in South America and/or North America, and Arab and Palestinian diasporic studies, and food studies. Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen's University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Ken Chitwood's Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam (University of Texas Press, 2025), uses rich ethnographic fieldwork across multiple cities and the digital space to capture the complex lived realities of Puerto Rican Muslims both on the island and in the United States. The study is attuned to the archipelago's context that accents Puerto Rican Islam, such as through histories that link it to Andalusian Spain, and culture, especially through foodscapes. Puerto Rico also has a diverse Arab Muslim diasporic population, especially Palestinians. Due to this diversity of Muslim experiences, throughout the book there emerge conversations about the boundaries of Islam in relation to culture, ethnicity, and theology. At times, when these varied communities share ritual and communal space together, questions of authenticity unfold, such as over language or notions of piety. Despite moments of tension around tribalism and questions of legitimacy, we learn that often Islam for both these communities is understood through their experiences of colonialism, and so anti-colonial registers of Islam influence the solidarity building and social justice organizing that unites Puerto Rican and Palestinian Muslims. The book also has an accompanying Spotify playlist that you definitely should check out. This book will be of interest to anyone working on Islam in South America and/or North America, and Arab and Palestinian diasporic studies, and food studies. Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen's University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Ken Chitwood's Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam (University of Texas Press, 2025), uses rich ethnographic fieldwork across multiple cities and the digital space to capture the complex lived realities of Puerto Rican Muslims both on the island and in the United States. The study is attuned to the archipelago's context that accents Puerto Rican Islam, such as through histories that link it to Andalusian Spain, and culture, especially through foodscapes. Puerto Rico also has a diverse Arab Muslim diasporic population, especially Palestinians. Due to this diversity of Muslim experiences, throughout the book there emerge conversations about the boundaries of Islam in relation to culture, ethnicity, and theology. At times, when these varied communities share ritual and communal space together, questions of authenticity unfold, such as over language or notions of piety. Despite moments of tension around tribalism and questions of legitimacy, we learn that often Islam for both these communities is understood through their experiences of colonialism, and so anti-colonial registers of Islam influence the solidarity building and social justice organizing that unites Puerto Rican and Palestinian Muslims. The book also has an accompanying Spotify playlist that you definitely should check out. This book will be of interest to anyone working on Islam in South America and/or North America, and Arab and Palestinian diasporic studies, and food studies. Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen's University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Ken Chitwood's Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam (University of Texas Press, 2025), uses rich ethnographic fieldwork across multiple cities and the digital space to capture the complex lived realities of Puerto Rican Muslims both on the island and in the United States. The study is attuned to the archipelago's context that accents Puerto Rican Islam, such as through histories that link it to Andalusian Spain, and culture, especially through foodscapes. Puerto Rico also has a diverse Arab Muslim diasporic population, especially Palestinians. Due to this diversity of Muslim experiences, throughout the book there emerge conversations about the boundaries of Islam in relation to culture, ethnicity, and theology. At times, when these varied communities share ritual and communal space together, questions of authenticity unfold, such as over language or notions of piety. Despite moments of tension around tribalism and questions of legitimacy, we learn that often Islam for both these communities is understood through their experiences of colonialism, and so anti-colonial registers of Islam influence the solidarity building and social justice organizing that unites Puerto Rican and Palestinian Muslims. The book also has an accompanying Spotify playlist that you definitely should check out. This book will be of interest to anyone working on Islam in South America and/or North America, and Arab and Palestinian diasporic studies, and food studies. Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen's University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Ken Chitwood's Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam (University of Texas Press, 2025), uses rich ethnographic fieldwork across multiple cities and the digital space to capture the complex lived realities of Puerto Rican Muslims both on the island and in the United States. The study is attuned to the archipelago's context that accents Puerto Rican Islam, such as through histories that link it to Andalusian Spain, and culture, especially through foodscapes. Puerto Rico also has a diverse Arab Muslim diasporic population, especially Palestinians. Due to this diversity of Muslim experiences, throughout the book there emerge conversations about the boundaries of Islam in relation to culture, ethnicity, and theology. At times, when these varied communities share ritual and communal space together, questions of authenticity unfold, such as over language or notions of piety. Despite moments of tension around tribalism and questions of legitimacy, we learn that often Islam for both these communities is understood through their experiences of colonialism, and so anti-colonial registers of Islam influence the solidarity building and social justice organizing that unites Puerto Rican and Palestinian Muslims. The book also has an accompanying Spotify playlist that you definitely should check out. This book will be of interest to anyone working on Islam in South America and/or North America, and Arab and Palestinian diasporic studies, and food studies. Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen's University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

If you've ever wondered where your wheat flour is coming from, who is milling it (and how), or how it came to be such an important staple, then this episode might be for you. Dr. Rebecca Sharpless speaks with host Scott Catey about People of the Wheat: Culture and Cultivation in North Texas (U Texas Press, 2026). This book examines the history of wheat in the six counties of the North Texas wheat belt, and how wheat growing, milling, and baking shaped the people and culture there. In the national imaginary, America's amber fields of grain lie in the country's center, but for more than a century, they also grew across one pocket of the South: North Texas. From the 1840s to the 1970s, the state's agriculture, dominated in lore by cotton in the east and livestock in the open range, was heavily invested in the cultivation, processing, sale, and consumption of wheat. Recalling a forgotten history, Rebecca Sharpless shows how the rhythms of the wheat harvest—and the evolution of the milling, distribution, and baking industries—governed daily life in what is now known as the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. In the 1840s, Anglo settlers discovered that grain flourished in North Texas and quickly built an economy that included wheat in fields, mills, and kitchens. After the Civil War, hand labor gave way to mechanization, greatly increasing production. Commercial bakeries churned out novel confections, and big cities were built on the bounty of the countryside. In the second half of the twentieth century, as production moved northward, industrial milling and baking declined, but home baking boomed, flour advertising supported regional music, and wheat fortunes financed the region's cultural life. Sharpless covers 150 years of wheat's very human history and shows how the labor that cultivated it, the sustenance it provided, and the prosperity it generated left an indelible mark on the people and institutions of Texas. Dr. Rebecca Sharpless is a Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She specializes in Gender & Sexuality, Texas History, and American History. She is the author of three previous books: Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South (2022); Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (2010); and Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 (1999). Dr. Scott Catey is founder of The Catey Creative Group, LLC. and host of the podcast The Sum of All Wisdom. Website here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

If you've ever wondered where your wheat flour is coming from, who is milling it (and how), or how it came to be such an important staple, then this episode might be for you. Dr. Rebecca Sharpless speaks with host Scott Catey about People of the Wheat: Culture and Cultivation in North Texas (U Texas Press, 2026). This book examines the history of wheat in the six counties of the North Texas wheat belt, and how wheat growing, milling, and baking shaped the people and culture there. In the national imaginary, America's amber fields of grain lie in the country's center, but for more than a century, they also grew across one pocket of the South: North Texas. From the 1840s to the 1970s, the state's agriculture, dominated in lore by cotton in the east and livestock in the open range, was heavily invested in the cultivation, processing, sale, and consumption of wheat. Recalling a forgotten history, Rebecca Sharpless shows how the rhythms of the wheat harvest—and the evolution of the milling, distribution, and baking industries—governed daily life in what is now known as the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. In the 1840s, Anglo settlers discovered that grain flourished in North Texas and quickly built an economy that included wheat in fields, mills, and kitchens. After the Civil War, hand labor gave way to mechanization, greatly increasing production. Commercial bakeries churned out novel confections, and big cities were built on the bounty of the countryside. In the second half of the twentieth century, as production moved northward, industrial milling and baking declined, but home baking boomed, flour advertising supported regional music, and wheat fortunes financed the region's cultural life. Sharpless covers 150 years of wheat's very human history and shows how the labor that cultivated it, the sustenance it provided, and the prosperity it generated left an indelible mark on the people and institutions of Texas. Dr. Rebecca Sharpless is a Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She specializes in Gender & Sexuality, Texas History, and American History. She is the author of three previous books: Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South (2022); Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (2010); and Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 (1999). Dr. Scott Catey is founder of The Catey Creative Group, LLC. and host of the podcast The Sum of All Wisdom. Website here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

If you've ever wondered where your wheat flour is coming from, who is milling it (and how), or how it came to be such an important staple, then this episode might be for you. Dr. Rebecca Sharpless speaks with host Scott Catey about People of the Wheat: Culture and Cultivation in North Texas (U Texas Press, 2026). This book examines the history of wheat in the six counties of the North Texas wheat belt, and how wheat growing, milling, and baking shaped the people and culture there. In the national imaginary, America's amber fields of grain lie in the country's center, but for more than a century, they also grew across one pocket of the South: North Texas. From the 1840s to the 1970s, the state's agriculture, dominated in lore by cotton in the east and livestock in the open range, was heavily invested in the cultivation, processing, sale, and consumption of wheat. Recalling a forgotten history, Rebecca Sharpless shows how the rhythms of the wheat harvest—and the evolution of the milling, distribution, and baking industries—governed daily life in what is now known as the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. In the 1840s, Anglo settlers discovered that grain flourished in North Texas and quickly built an economy that included wheat in fields, mills, and kitchens. After the Civil War, hand labor gave way to mechanization, greatly increasing production. Commercial bakeries churned out novel confections, and big cities were built on the bounty of the countryside. In the second half of the twentieth century, as production moved northward, industrial milling and baking declined, but home baking boomed, flour advertising supported regional music, and wheat fortunes financed the region's cultural life. Sharpless covers 150 years of wheat's very human history and shows how the labor that cultivated it, the sustenance it provided, and the prosperity it generated left an indelible mark on the people and institutions of Texas. Dr. Rebecca Sharpless is a Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She specializes in Gender & Sexuality, Texas History, and American History. She is the author of three previous books: Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South (2022); Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (2010); and Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 (1999). Dr. Scott Catey is founder of The Catey Creative Group, LLC. and host of the podcast The Sum of All Wisdom. Website here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

If you've ever wondered where your wheat flour is coming from, who is milling it (and how), or how it came to be such an important staple, then this episode might be for you. Dr. Rebecca Sharpless speaks with host Scott Catey about People of the Wheat: Culture and Cultivation in North Texas (U Texas Press, 2026). This book examines the history of wheat in the six counties of the North Texas wheat belt, and how wheat growing, milling, and baking shaped the people and culture there. In the national imaginary, America's amber fields of grain lie in the country's center, but for more than a century, they also grew across one pocket of the South: North Texas. From the 1840s to the 1970s, the state's agriculture, dominated in lore by cotton in the east and livestock in the open range, was heavily invested in the cultivation, processing, sale, and consumption of wheat. Recalling a forgotten history, Rebecca Sharpless shows how the rhythms of the wheat harvest—and the evolution of the milling, distribution, and baking industries—governed daily life in what is now known as the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. In the 1840s, Anglo settlers discovered that grain flourished in North Texas and quickly built an economy that included wheat in fields, mills, and kitchens. After the Civil War, hand labor gave way to mechanization, greatly increasing production. Commercial bakeries churned out novel confections, and big cities were built on the bounty of the countryside. In the second half of the twentieth century, as production moved northward, industrial milling and baking declined, but home baking boomed, flour advertising supported regional music, and wheat fortunes financed the region's cultural life. Sharpless covers 150 years of wheat's very human history and shows how the labor that cultivated it, the sustenance it provided, and the prosperity it generated left an indelible mark on the people and institutions of Texas. Dr. Rebecca Sharpless is a Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She specializes in Gender & Sexuality, Texas History, and American History. She is the author of three previous books: Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South (2022); Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (2010); and Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 (1999). Dr. Scott Catey is founder of The Catey Creative Group, LLC. and host of the podcast The Sum of All Wisdom. Website here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

If you've ever wondered where your wheat flour is coming from, who is milling it (and how), or how it came to be such an important staple, then this episode might be for you. Dr. Rebecca Sharpless speaks with host Scott Catey about People of the Wheat: Culture and Cultivation in North Texas (U Texas Press, 2026). This book examines the history of wheat in the six counties of the North Texas wheat belt, and how wheat growing, milling, and baking shaped the people and culture there. In the national imaginary, America's amber fields of grain lie in the country's center, but for more than a century, they also grew across one pocket of the South: North Texas. From the 1840s to the 1970s, the state's agriculture, dominated in lore by cotton in the east and livestock in the open range, was heavily invested in the cultivation, processing, sale, and consumption of wheat. Recalling a forgotten history, Rebecca Sharpless shows how the rhythms of the wheat harvest—and the evolution of the milling, distribution, and baking industries—governed daily life in what is now known as the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. In the 1840s, Anglo settlers discovered that grain flourished in North Texas and quickly built an economy that included wheat in fields, mills, and kitchens. After the Civil War, hand labor gave way to mechanization, greatly increasing production. Commercial bakeries churned out novel confections, and big cities were built on the bounty of the countryside. In the second half of the twentieth century, as production moved northward, industrial milling and baking declined, but home baking boomed, flour advertising supported regional music, and wheat fortunes financed the region's cultural life. Sharpless covers 150 years of wheat's very human history and shows how the labor that cultivated it, the sustenance it provided, and the prosperity it generated left an indelible mark on the people and institutions of Texas. Dr. Rebecca Sharpless is a Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She specializes in Gender & Sexuality, Texas History, and American History. She is the author of three previous books: Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South (2022); Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (2010); and Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 (1999). Dr. Scott Catey is founder of The Catey Creative Group, LLC. and host of the podcast The Sum of All Wisdom. Website here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the countless venues across the Roman Empire which for over five hundred years drew the biggest crowds both in the Republic and under the Emperors. The shows there delighted the masses who knew, no matter how low their place in society, they were much better off than the gladiators about to fight or the beasts to be slaughtered. Some of the Roman elites were disgusted, seeing this popular entertainment as morally corrupting and un-Roman. Moral degradation was a less immediate concern though than the overspill of violence. There was a constant threat of gladiators being used as a private army and while those of the elite wealthy enough to stage the shows hoped to win great prestige, they risked disappointing a crowd which could quickly become a mob and turn on them.With Kathleen Coleman James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard UniversityJohn Pearce Reader in Archaeology at King's College LondonAndMatthew Nicholls Fellow and Senior Tutor at St John's College, OxfordProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:C. A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton University Press, 1993)Roger Dunkle, Gladiators: Violence and Spectacle in Ancient Rome (Pearson, 2008)Garrett G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (Cambridge University Press, 2011)A. Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (University of Texas Press, 1997)A. Futrell, The Roman Games: A Sourcebook (Blackwell Publishing, 2006)Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, The Colosseum (Profile, 2005)Luciana Jacobelli, Gladiators at Pompeii (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003)Eckart Köhne and Cornelia Ewigleben (eds.), Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome (University of California Press, 2000)Donald Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (Routledge, 1998)F. Meijer, The Gladiators: History's Most Deadly Sport (Souvenir, 2004)Jerry Toner, The Day Commodus killed a Rhino: Understanding the Roman Games (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)K. Welch, The Roman Amphitheatre from its Origins to the Colosseum (Cambridge University Press, 2007)T. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (Routledge, 1992)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the countless venues across the Roman Empire which for over five hundred years drew the biggest crowds both in the Republic and under the Emperors. The shows there delighted the masses who knew, no matter how low their place in society, they were much better off than the gladiators about to fight or the beasts to be slaughtered. Some of the Roman elites were disgusted, seeing this popular entertainment as morally corrupting and un-Roman. Moral degradation was a less immediate concern though than the overspill of violence. There was a constant threat of gladiators being used as a private army and while those of the elite wealthy enough to stage the shows hoped to win great prestige, they risked disappointing a crowd which could quickly become a mob and turn on them.With Kathleen Coleman James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard UniversityJohn Pearce Reader in Archaeology at King's College LondonAndMatthew Nicholls Fellow and Senior Tutor at St John's College, OxfordProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:C. A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton University Press, 1993)Roger Dunkle, Gladiators: Violence and Spectacle in Ancient Rome (Pearson, 2008)Garrett G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (Cambridge University Press, 2011)A. Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (University of Texas Press, 1997)A. Futrell, The Roman Games: A Sourcebook (Blackwell Publishing, 2006)Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, The Colosseum (Profile, 2005)Luciana Jacobelli, Gladiators at Pompeii (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003)Eckart Köhne and Cornelia Ewigleben (eds.), Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome (University of California Press, 2000)Donald Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (Routledge, 1998)F. Meijer, The Gladiators: History's Most Deadly Sport (Souvenir, 2004)Jerry Toner, The Day Commodus killed a Rhino: Understanding the Roman Games (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)K. Welch, The Roman Amphitheatre from its Origins to the Colosseum (Cambridge University Press, 2007)T. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (Routledge, 1992)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

Extractivism—exploiting the earth for resources—has long driven racial capitalism and colonialism. And yet, how does extractivism operate in a world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are unprecedentedly widespread? Eray Çaylı argues it does so by mobilizing these sensibilities in new ways. Extractivism is no longer only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also leaving those who witness this violent displacement sentimentally moved. Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan (U Texas Press, 2025) conceptualizes this duality. Derived from Çaylı's years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world's largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century—Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. Together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism both by making its harm visible and by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms. Host: Ronay Bakan is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at European University Institute, in Italy. Her research interests include political geography, mobilization, and counterinsurgency in Southwest Asia and North Africa with a special focus on Northern Kurdistan. She is currently working on her book titled “Counterinsurgent Urbanism: Weaponizing Land and Heritage in Northern Kurdistan.” Email: ronay.bakan@eui.eu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Extractivism—exploiting the earth for resources—has long driven racial capitalism and colonialism. And yet, how does extractivism operate in a world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are unprecedentedly widespread? Eray Çaylı argues it does so by mobilizing these sensibilities in new ways. Extractivism is no longer only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also leaving those who witness this violent displacement sentimentally moved. Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan (U Texas Press, 2025) conceptualizes this duality. Derived from Çaylı's years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world's largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century—Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. Together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism both by making its harm visible and by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms. Host: Ronay Bakan is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at European University Institute, in Italy. Her research interests include political geography, mobilization, and counterinsurgency in Southwest Asia and North Africa with a special focus on Northern Kurdistan. She is currently working on her book titled “Counterinsurgent Urbanism: Weaponizing Land and Heritage in Northern Kurdistan.” Email: ronay.bakan@eui.eu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Extractivism—exploiting the earth for resources—has long driven racial capitalism and colonialism. And yet, how does extractivism operate in a world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are unprecedentedly widespread? Eray Çaylı argues it does so by mobilizing these sensibilities in new ways. Extractivism is no longer only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also leaving those who witness this violent displacement sentimentally moved. Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan (U Texas Press, 2025) conceptualizes this duality. Derived from Çaylı's years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world's largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century—Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. Together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism both by making its harm visible and by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms. Host: Ronay Bakan is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at European University Institute, in Italy. Her research interests include political geography, mobilization, and counterinsurgency in Southwest Asia and North Africa with a special focus on Northern Kurdistan. She is currently working on her book titled “Counterinsurgent Urbanism: Weaponizing Land and Heritage in Northern Kurdistan.” Email: ronay.bakan@eui.eu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Extractivism—exploiting the earth for resources—has long driven racial capitalism and colonialism. And yet, how does extractivism operate in a world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are unprecedentedly widespread? Eray Çaylı argues it does so by mobilizing these sensibilities in new ways. Extractivism is no longer only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also leaving those who witness this violent displacement sentimentally moved. Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan (U Texas Press, 2025) conceptualizes this duality. Derived from Çaylı's years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world's largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century—Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. Together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism both by making its harm visible and by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms. Host: Ronay Bakan is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at European University Institute, in Italy. Her research interests include political geography, mobilization, and counterinsurgency in Southwest Asia and North Africa with a special focus on Northern Kurdistan. She is currently working on her book titled “Counterinsurgent Urbanism: Weaponizing Land and Heritage in Northern Kurdistan.” Email: ronay.bakan@eui.eu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Extractivism—exploiting the earth for resources—has long driven racial capitalism and colonialism. And yet, how does extractivism operate in a world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are unprecedentedly widespread? Eray Çaylı argues it does so by mobilizing these sensibilities in new ways. Extractivism is no longer only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also leaving those who witness this violent displacement sentimentally moved. Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan (U Texas Press, 2025) conceptualizes this duality. Derived from Çaylı's years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world's largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century—Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. Together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism both by making its harm visible and by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms. Host: Ronay Bakan is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at European University Institute, in Italy. Her research interests include political geography, mobilization, and counterinsurgency in Southwest Asia and North Africa with a special focus on Northern Kurdistan. She is currently working on her book titled “Counterinsurgent Urbanism: Weaponizing Land and Heritage in Northern Kurdistan.” Email: ronay.bakan@eui.eu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Chris Coyne talks with Abigail Hall and Jayme Lemke about Kenneth and Elise Boulding's insights into what it means to build and sustain peace. Drawing on her paper “In Search of Stable Peace,” Hall explores Kenneth Boulding's framework for understanding peace and war, focusing on the roles of strain and strength and the shifting taboo lines that shape movement between stable and unstable peace. Lemke then turns to Elise Boulding's vision of peace as an active, everyday practice, emphasizing the often-overlooked forms of peacebuilding embedded in ordinary social relationships and institutions. Together, the conversations emphasize peace as a process shaped by ideas, institutions, and imagination.Dr. Abigail R. Hall is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Tampa and a Senior Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She has published numerous books, including her most recent satirical book, How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite co-authored with Christopher J. Coyne (2024). She holds a PhD in Economics from George Mason University and is an alum of the Mercatus PhD Fellowship.Dr. Jayme Lemke is a Senior Research Fellow and a Senior Fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She is co-editor of Economy, Polity, and Society, an Associate Editor for the Review of Behavioral Economics, and Secretary of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics.Show Notes:The Journal of Conflict ResolutionKenneth Boulding's book, Stable Peace (University of Texas Press, 1978)Robert Higgs's book, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (Independent Institute, 2025)Elise Boulding's book, Cultures of Peace (Syracuse University Press, 2000)Kenneth Boulding's book, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (University of Michigan Press, 1956).Elise Boulding's book, The Underside of History: A View of Women Through Time (SAGE Publications, 1992)Julian Simon's book, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton University Press, 1998)**This episode was recorded September 15, 2025 and December 29, 2025.If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgramFollow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatusCC Music: Twisterium

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Chris Coyne delivers a keynote lecture at the 2023 Markets & Society conference on the foundations of peace. He contrasts “top-down” peacemaking driven by elites with “bottom-up” peacemaking that emerges from the everyday practices of ordinary people.Coyne argues that much of the social-scientific and policy conversation treats peace as a public good best supplied through state-intervention. He develops an alternative framework—pax hominem—that treats peace as an emergent, learned, and constantly renewed process. Drawing on mainline political economy and the work of Kenneth Boulding, Coyne shows how peaceful cooperation depends on local knowledge, social norms, and institutions that help people navigate conflict without violence across families, communities, and markets. Together, these insights point toward a research and policy agenda focused less on imposing order and more on creating space for self-governance and the bottom-up cultivation of peace.Dr. Christopher J. Coyne is Associate Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center and Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He has published numerous books, including How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite (Independent Institute, 2024), In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace (Independent Institute, 2022), and Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails (Stanford University Press, 2013).**This episode was recorded October 20, 2024.Show Notes:Kenneth Boulding's book, Stable Peace (University of Texas Press, 1978)Elise Boulding's book, Cultures of Peace(Syracuse University Press, 2000)James C. Scott's book, Seeing Like a State (Yale University Press, 1999)Caroline Elkin's book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (Penguin Random House, 2023)James M. Buchanan's Nobel Prize LectureElinor Ostrom et. al's paper, “Covenants with and without a Sword: Self-Governance Is Possible” (APSR, 2013)Virgil storr et. al's book, Community Revival in the Wake of Disaster: Lessons in Local Entrepreneurship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)Mikayla Novak's book, Freedom in Contention: Social Movements and Liberal Political Economy (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021)Virgil Storr and Ginny Choi's book, Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgramFollow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatusCC Music: Twisterium

In the public eye, Najati Sidqi was known as a journalist and writer, a translator of Russian classics, and an outspoken opponent of Nazism. However, Sidqi concealed a critical component of his life from the world and his family. He was an underground activist for the Palestinian Communist Party, a risky and influential pursuit that took him to early Bolshevik Moscow, British courts and prison cells in Palestine, Nazi Germany, intrigue-heavy interwar Paris, and Civil War Spain, Morocco, and Algeria. Throughout his journey, Sidqi continued to write, even as he faced fascism, intense surveillance, active warzones, the death of friends, and exile. Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist: The Secret Life of Najati Sidqi (U Texas Press, 2025) brings Sidqi's incredible life and work to light, wryly narrating his international travels, his work as an activist, and his political dealings at a crucial moment for Palestine and the international fight against fascism. Translated from Arabic into English for the first time, it is a riveting firsthand account of an often-overlooked aspect of the history of the global left. Generous supplementary materials make the memoir accessible to students and non-specialist scholars: a preface by Sidqi's grandson, a foreword by renowned historian Joel Beinin, a translators' introduction that presents new research on Sidqi's family history, a map of his travels, and a timeline, as well as a bibliographic essay offering pointers for further research.In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat with Margaret Litvin to talk about The Memoir of Najati Sidqi as a powerful Palestinian life narrative and a groundbreaking collaborative translation project. Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Cosmosexuals: Screen Acting, Stardom, and Male Sex Appeal (U Texas Press, 2025), Dr. Mark Gallagher presents an examination of male screen sex appeal and the ways that race, ethnicity, and national origin combine with performance tools and film and television style to aid or inhibit actors' circulation on an increasingly global stage. Sex appeal is complicated, especially for screen actors. Looking good is not enough. Charisma and charm have to register when the camera rolls. And sexiness has to travel. Today's heartthrobs are expected to raise temperatures all around the world. Cosmosexuals theorizes male sex appeal as a form of capital in an age of international stardom. Screen scholar Dr. Gallagher assembles a diverse cast—Idris Elba, Pedro Pascal, Simu Liu, Ryan Gosling, and more—analyzing how each actor uses his appearance, voice, and movement to perform in ways that viewers across cultural divides register as sexually appealing. Cosmosexuals also explores the intersection of global sex appeal and exoticism in historical and contemporary contexts—from the malleable racial identities of Omar Sharif and Conrad Veidt to Mads Mikkelsen's “accented whiteness”—and assesses the barriers that confine nonwhite actors, in spite of their talent or celebrity. Far more than handsome faces and chiseled abs, male sex symbols emerge as laborers subject to disciplinary regimes steeped in patriarchy, racism, and structural inequity. As such, they have much to tell us about the economies of taste at work in the construction of screen masculinity and the terms of human desire. 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/new-books-network

In Cosmosexuals: Screen Acting, Stardom, and Male Sex Appeal (U Texas Press, 2025), Dr. Mark Gallagher presents an examination of male screen sex appeal and the ways that race, ethnicity, and national origin combine with performance tools and film and television style to aid or inhibit actors' circulation on an increasingly global stage. Sex appeal is complicated, especially for screen actors. Looking good is not enough. Charisma and charm have to register when the camera rolls. And sexiness has to travel. Today's heartthrobs are expected to raise temperatures all around the world. Cosmosexuals theorizes male sex appeal as a form of capital in an age of international stardom. Screen scholar Dr. Gallagher assembles a diverse cast—Idris Elba, Pedro Pascal, Simu Liu, Ryan Gosling, and more—analyzing how each actor uses his appearance, voice, and movement to perform in ways that viewers across cultural divides register as sexually appealing. Cosmosexuals also explores the intersection of global sex appeal and exoticism in historical and contemporary contexts—from the malleable racial identities of Omar Sharif and Conrad Veidt to Mads Mikkelsen's “accented whiteness”—and assesses the barriers that confine nonwhite actors, in spite of their talent or celebrity. Far more than handsome faces and chiseled abs, male sex symbols emerge as laborers subject to disciplinary regimes steeped in patriarchy, racism, and structural inequity. As such, they have much to tell us about the economies of taste at work in the construction of screen masculinity and the terms of human desire. 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/gender-studies

In Cosmosexuals: Screen Acting, Stardom, and Male Sex Appeal (U Texas Press, 2025), Dr. Mark Gallagher presents an examination of male screen sex appeal and the ways that race, ethnicity, and national origin combine with performance tools and film and television style to aid or inhibit actors' circulation on an increasingly global stage. Sex appeal is complicated, especially for screen actors. Looking good is not enough. Charisma and charm have to register when the camera rolls. And sexiness has to travel. Today's heartthrobs are expected to raise temperatures all around the world. Cosmosexuals theorizes male sex appeal as a form of capital in an age of international stardom. Screen scholar Dr. Gallagher assembles a diverse cast—Idris Elba, Pedro Pascal, Simu Liu, Ryan Gosling, and more—analyzing how each actor uses his appearance, voice, and movement to perform in ways that viewers across cultural divides register as sexually appealing. Cosmosexuals also explores the intersection of global sex appeal and exoticism in historical and contemporary contexts—from the malleable racial identities of Omar Sharif and Conrad Veidt to Mads Mikkelsen's “accented whiteness”—and assesses the barriers that confine nonwhite actors, in spite of their talent or celebrity. Far more than handsome faces and chiseled abs, male sex symbols emerge as laborers subject to disciplinary regimes steeped in patriarchy, racism, and structural inequity. As such, they have much to tell us about the economies of taste at work in the construction of screen masculinity and the terms of human desire. 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/film

In the public eye, Najati Sidqi was known as a journalist and writer, a translator of Russian classics, and an outspoken opponent of Nazism. However, Sidqi concealed a critical component of his life from the world and his family. He was an underground activist for the Palestinian Communist Party, a risky and influential pursuit that took him to early Bolshevik Moscow, British courts and prison cells in Palestine, Nazi Germany, intrigue-heavy interwar Paris, and Civil War Spain, Morocco, and Algeria. Throughout his journey, Sidqi continued to write, even as he faced fascism, intense surveillance, active warzones, the death of friends, and exile. Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist: The Secret Life of Najati Sidqi (U Texas Press, 2025) brings Sidqi's incredible life and work to light, wryly narrating his international travels, his work as an activist, and his political dealings at a crucial moment for Palestine and the international fight against fascism. Translated from Arabic into English for the first time, it is a riveting firsthand account of an often-overlooked aspect of the history of the global left. Generous supplementary materials make the memoir accessible to students and non-specialist scholars: a preface by Sidqi's grandson, a foreword by renowned historian Joel Beinin, a translators' introduction that presents new research on Sidqi's family history, a map of his travels, and a timeline, as well as a bibliographic essay offering pointers for further research.In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat with Margaret Litvin to talk about The Memoir of Najati Sidqi as a powerful Palestinian life narrative and a groundbreaking collaborative translation project. Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance (U Texas Press, 2024) investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries. Imagining the Method traces the primordial conditions under which the Method was conceived. It explores John Garfield's tenuous relationship with methodness due to his identity. It considers the links between John Wayne's reliance on "anti-Method" stardom and Marlon Brando and James Dean's ascribed embodiment of Method features. It dissects contemporary emphases on transformation and considers the implications of methodness in the encoding of AI performers. Altogether, Justin Rawlins offers a revisionist history of the Method that shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness and the still-dominant assumptions about race, gender, and screen actors and acting that inform how we talk about performance and performers. Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies