New Books in History
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New Books in History
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000...
Recent Episodes
996 episodes
Christopher de Bellaigue, "The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King" (Bodley Head, 2025)
What does a 16th century ruler reveal about the nature of power, past and present?
Istanbul, 1538. The greatest of the Ottoman Sultans is...
Fred S. Naiden, "Railroaded: A Motorman’s Story of the New York City Subway" (Rutgers UP, 2026)
Fred S. Naiden, professor emeritus of history of at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is an authority on the ancient world. In the 1980...
John Kapusta, "Self-Realization Nation: How Artists of the Creative Counterculture Made a New America" (U California Press, 2026)
John Kapusta's Self-Realization Nation: How Artists of the Creative Counterculture Made a New America (U California Press, 2026) is the story of an un...
Thomas S. Mullaney, "How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information" (W. W. Norton, 2026)
This is the third time I have the great fortune of interviewing Tom Mullaney. I can hardly think of a more worthy ambassador for the history disciplin...
Fabio Lanza, "Urban Revolution: People's Communes in Beijing" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
During the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), the collectivization of the Chinese countryside had catastrophic results, but how did this short-lived politi...
Sharron Wilkins Conrad, "The Trinity: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Civil Rights in African American Memory" (UNC Press, 2026)
A striking triptych once displayed in countless African American households, the Trinity typically features Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and...
Andy Byford, "Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Between the 1880s and the 1930s, children became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest in modernizing societies worldwide, i...
Michelle Chase and Isabella Cosse eds., "The Cuban Revolution and the New Left: Transnational Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Family" (U Florida Press, 2026)
Understanding overlooked dimensions of the Cuban Revolution and its
impact on the global left in the 1960s and beyond. This volume, The Cuban...
Ciruce A. Movahedi-Lankarani, "Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran" (Stanford UP, 2026)
Between the late 1940s and the end of the twentieth century, natural gas became Iran's bedrock energy source. Billed as a futuristic fuel for a future...
Laura Borghetti and Thomas Arentzen, "Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
How can we study the late ancient and Byzantine history from ecological perspectives? How might one grapple with the more-than-human in sources and me...
Olivier Krischer and Shuxia Chen, "Wayfaring: Photography in Taiwan, 1950s-1980s" (Australian Centre on China in the World, 2025)
Wayfaring: Photography in Taiwan, 1950s–1980s (Australian Centre on China in the World, 2025) explores four transformative decades of photography in...
Mesrob Vartavarian, "Privileged Minorities: A History of Wealth Concentration on South Africa" (Ohio UP, 2026)
Mesrob Vartavarian has written a wonderful book. Privileged Minorities: A History of Wealth Concentration on South Africa (Ohio UP, 2026) argues that...
Peter Paul Dobek, "The Public House in Central Europe: Inns, Tavern, and Alehouses in Cracow during the Jagiellonian Dynasty" (Lexington Books, 2024)
In his new book The Public House in Central Europe: Inns, Tavern, and Alehouses in Cracow during the Jagiellonian Dynasty (Lexington Books, 2024), Pe...
Alex Boodrookas, "Comrades Estranged: Labor and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Persian Gulf" (Stanford UP, 2026)
In 1975, Kuwaiti workers orchestrated arguably the most powerful
citizen-led movement for noncitizen rights in the history of the Persian
...
James O'Leary, "The Middlebrow Musical: Between Broadway and Opera in 1940s America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The premiere of Oklahoma! in 1943 is commonly called a
“turning point” in the history of the Broadway musical. Often
characterized as th...
Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen, "Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)
The connections between Hong Kong and Japan began far earlier than many realise. Yet only recently has Hong Kong’s historic Japanese community receive...
Cheryl Thompson, "Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898-1919" (Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2026)
In the early twentieth century, as variety shows flooded Canadian stages, new forms of blackface, inspired by modern forms of amusements, changed the...
Cristina Florea, "Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but...
Brook Wilensky-Lanford, "A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2026)
Ever since conquistadores claimed Taino land in the name of their Catholic God and New England Puritans formed their strictly Protestant “city on a hi...
Derek R. Peterson, "A Popular History of Idi Amin's Uganda" (Yale UP, 2025)
Idi Amin ruled Uganda between 1971 and 1979, inflicting tremendous
violence on the people of the country. How did Amin's regime survive for
Pamela Walker Laird, "Self-Made: The Stories that Forged an American Myth" (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
"Self-Made" success is now an American badge of honor that rewards individualist ambitions while it hammers against community obligations. Yet, four c...
Jake Dyble, "Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany" (Boydell Press, 2025)
Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amounts
of capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions
that...
Sarah McNamara, "Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South" (UNC Press, 2023)
Decades before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, radical,
working-class women and men from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the
F...
Justin F Jackson, "The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines" (UNC Press, 2025)
In 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, the US Army seemed minuscule and ill-equipped for global conflict. Yet over the next fifteen years, i...
Aditya Deshbandhu, "The 21st Century in 100 Games" (Routledge, 2024)
The 21st Century in 100 Games (Routledge India, 2024) is an interactive public history of the contemporary world. It creates a ludological retelling o...
Bruce Dearstyne, "Revolutionary New York: 250 Years of Social Change" (SUNY Press, 2026)
Revolutionary New York: 250 Years of Social Change (SUNY Press, 2026), edited by Bruce Dearstyne and published by SUNY Press, examines what the volume...
Sarah M. Cushman et al eds., "The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau" (Routledge, 2026)
The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau (Routledge, 2026) examines Auschwitz-Birkenau as both a site and a symbol of Nazi genocide. Scholars from...
Robert B. Marks, "Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin: Nature and History Over the Last 10,000 Years" (U California Press, 2026)
"Deep Time," a way of understanding the distant past popularized in the late 20th century by the writer John McPhee, changes our perspective on histor...
Bruno Shirley, "Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka: The Reconstruction of Buddhist Kingship, ca. 1070-1215" (ARC Humanities Press, 2026)
Dr. Shirley's monograph, Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka: The Reconstruction of Buddhist Kingship, ca. 1070-1215 (ARC Humanities...
Homa Katouzian, "Iran and the Revolution: A History" (Yale UP, 2026)
Iran is, once again, in global headlines, following U.S. strikes on the country earlier this year. Operation Epic Fury, as the Department of Defense c...
Weipin Tsai, "The Making of China's Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation" (Harvard UP, 2024)
How did a vast, nationwide institution like a modern postal system
come into being in Qing China—right at the very end of the empire?
<...
Joanna Dee Das, "Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America (University of Chicago Press, 2025) examines the history of Branson, Missouri...
Sean Scalmer, "A Fair Day's Work: The Quest to Win Back Time" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Australia has a special place in the history of struggle for a Fair Day's Work.
In giving a history of Australian worker struggles over t...
Annette Gordon-Reed ed., "Jefferson on Race: A Reader" (Princeton UP, 2026)
From The New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson’...
Christos Lynteris, "How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)
Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without bein...
Timothy Mason Roberts, "After Barbary: Algeria's Roles in the French and American Empires" (Cornell UP, 2025)
After Barbary: Algeria's Roles in the French and American Empires (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Timothy Mason Roberts explores the connectio...
Hannah Shepherd, "The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region" (U California Press, 2025)
In The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region (U California Press, 2025), Hannah Shepherd examines the shared hist...
Timothy McCall, "Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood.
...
H. A. Drake, "The Wisdom of the Ancients: Four Ideas That Changed the World" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The Wisdom of the Ancients: Four Ideas That Changed the World (Oxford UP, 2025) is about four cornerstones of modern thought that were put in place...
Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)
Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnat...