New Books in History
Detajet e Kanalit
New Books in History
Interviews with Historians about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
Episode të Fundit
603 episode
Karl Ittmann, "Fuelling Empire: The British Imperial Oil Complex, 1886-1945" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, British companies used the resources of empire to create an imperial oil industry that controlled 20% of glo...
Justin Stover and George Woudhuysen, "The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
This book rediscovers a lost history of the Roman Empire, written by Sextus Aurelius Victor (ca. 320-390) and demonstrates for the first time both the...
Kathryn Hurlock, "Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World" (Profile, 2025)
This year, as they have for millennia, many people around the world will set out on pilgrimages. But these are not only journeys of personal and spiri...
Darren Mueller, "At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz" (Duke UP, 2024)
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and productio...
Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)
Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fa...
Lawrence Grossman, "Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945-2025" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)
In American Judaism today, Orthodoxy is the fastest growing movement. However, Orthodoxy is anything but monolithic.
Living in Both World...
Matthias Egeler, "Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld" (Yale UP, 2025)
Originating in Norse and Celtic mythologies, elves and fairies are a firmly established part of Western popular culture. Since the days of the Vikings...
John R. Davis, "Keep Your Ear to the Ground: A History of Punk Fanzines in Washington, DC" (Georgetown UP, 2025)
John R. Davis's Keep Your Ear to the Ground (Georgetown University Press, 2025) is the first history of the fanzines that emerged from Washington, DC'...
Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson, "A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899-1911" (Brill, 2025)
A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899-1911 is an encyclopaedic reference work docu...
Maria Fedorova, "Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)
Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935 (Northern Illinois UP, 2025) examines the US and Soviet exchange of a...
What is Free Speech with Fara Dabhoiwala
The speech debates have not abated, and it’s clear that invoking the First Amendment, and the importance of free speech for democracy, does not settle...
Aram G. Sarkisian, "Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era" (NYU Press, 2025)
Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era (NYU Press, 2025) is an Immigration and labor history of...
Miranda Spieler, "Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories" (Harvard UP, 2025)
In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pict...
Katherine J. Parkin, "The Abortion Market: Buying and Selling Access in the Era Before Roe" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
The abortion market was a powerful economic force in American life. Before legalization lowered the cost, one million women each year collectively pai...
Andrew Lambert, "No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One" (Yale UP, 2025)
How, for just over a century, Britain ensured it would not face another Napoleon Bonaparte--manipulating European powers while building a global marit...
Marion Orr, "House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr." (UNC Press, 2025)
At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922-1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1...
Xiaobo Lü, "Domination and Mobilization: The Rise and Fall of Political Parties in China's Republican Era" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
How and why did the Chinese Communist Party rise to power in the 1940s at the expense of its Nationalist (KMT) rival? In his new book, Domination and...
David M. Whitford, "The Making of a Reformation Man: Martin Luther and the Construction of Masculinity" (Routledge, 2025)
David Whitford joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, The Making of a Reformation Man: Martin Luther and the Construction of Masculinity (Routle...
Georgios Varouxakis, "The West: The History of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2025)
How did “the West” come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did “Westerners” begin to refer...
Jamal J. Elias, "After Rumi: The Mevlevis and Their World" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Jamal J. Elias' new book After Rumi: The Mevlevis & Their World (Harvard UP, 2025) takes us on a historical journey through the development of the Mev...
Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Kathleen Casey joins Jana Byars to talk about The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford UP, 2025). Purses and bags ha...
Kathryn Dyt, "The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)
When we think about the way that Southeast Asian rulers governed their kingdoms, we usually think of the relationship between the rulers and the peopl...
Branka Bogdan, "The New Yugoslav Woman: Reproductive Regulation in Socialist Yugoslavia" (Indiana UP, 2025)
From 1945 to 1989, the Yugoslav state connected its claims of progressive politics and gender equality to its support of free healthcare, sex educatio...
Jennifer Barry, "Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination" (U California Press, 2025)
Gender Violence in Late Antiquity confronts the violent ideological frameworks underpinning the early Christian imagination, arguing that gender-based...
Elizabeth E. Imber, "Uncertain Empire: Jews, Nationalism, and the Fate of British Imperialism" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Following the British conquest of Ottoman Palestine, Jews across the British Empire—from Jerusalem to Johannesburg, London to Calcutta—found themselve...
Mary E. Hicks, "Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2025)
From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every...
Jonn Elledge, "A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps" (Experiment, 2024)
In this eye-opening investigation into the most remarkable points on the map, a single boundary might, upon closer inspection, reveal eons of history—...
Deborah Willis, "The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship" (NYU Press, 2025)
A stunning collection of stoic portraits and intimate ephemera from the lives of Black Civil War soldiers
Though both the Union and Confe...
Adrian Pole, "Making Antifascist War: The International Brigades' Transnational Encounters with Civil-War Spain, 1936-1939" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Making Antifascist War: The International Brigades' Transnational Encounters with Civil-War Spain, 1936-1939 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is a study of the 35...
Valerie Schutte and Jessica S. Hower eds., "Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Re-making of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Re-making of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) explores (mis)representations of two...
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, "More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy" (Harper, 2025)
It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and th...
Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025)
Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and...
Calvin Schermerhorn, "The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made" (Yale UP, 2025)
Dr. J Calvin Schermerhorn is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His...
Tanja Petrovic, "Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army" (Duke UP, 2024)
The compulsory service for young men in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) created bonds across ethnic, religious, and social lines. These bonds persist...
Amit Varshizky, "The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview" (Taylor & Francis, 2024)
The Metaphysics of Race seeks to reframe debates on the conflicting scientific and spiritual traditions that underpinned the Nazi worldview, showing h...
Marcus Rediker, "Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea" (Penguin Group, 2025)
Conspiracy, mutiny and liberation on America’s waterfront by the award-winning author of The Slave Ship.
Freedom Ship: The Uncharted His...
Jack Hartnell, "Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image" (Princeton UP, 2025)
The Wound Man—a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely across...
I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom
“My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery,” declared Jean‑Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the most radi...
Celene Reynolds, "Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX" (Princeton UP, 2025)
When the US Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, no one expected it to become a prominent tool for confronting sexual harass...
Jessica B. Harris, "Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine" (Clarkson Potter, 2025)
Discover the sweeping story of how Indigenous, European, and African traditions intertwined to form an entirely new cuisine, with over 90 recipes for...