New Books in History

New Books in History

Interviews with Historians about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Episodes

Mark Somos, Matthew Cleary, Pablo Dufour, Edward Jones Corredera, and Emanuele Salerno, "The Unseen History of International Law" (Oxford UP, 2025)

June 17, 2025 • 65 mins
The Unseen History of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2025) locates and describes almost one thousand surviving copies of the first nine editions of Hugo Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis (IBP) published between 1625 and 1650. Meticulously reconstructing the publishing history of these first nine editions and cataloguing copies across hundreds of collections, The Unseen History provides fundamental data for reconstructing...
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Frederick Reece, "Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon" (Oxford University Press, 2025)

June 17, 2025 • 64 mins
We all know about art forgeries, but why write fake classical music? In Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. Frederick Reece investigates the methods and motives of mysterious musicians who sign famous historical names like Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert to their own original works. Analyzing a series of genuinely fake sonatas, concertos, and symphonies in detail, Dr. ...
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Barbara Allen, "Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds: Stories of Extinction" (Reaktion, 2025)

June 16, 2025 • 67 mins
Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds: Stories of Extinction (Reaktion, 2025) by Reverend Barbara Allen presents thirty-one extinct species through the personal perspectives of those animals. This intimate approach not only highlights each species but explores the broader implications of losing a species forever. How do we honour such a loss? Can we grieve for species we never knew? These animals range from the well-known passenger pig...
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L. Sasha Gora, "Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada" (University of Toronto Press, 2025)

June 16, 2025 • 60 mins
Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2025) by Dr. L. Sasha Gora explores the complex relationships between wild plants and introduced animals, Indigenous foodways, and Canadian regulations. Blending food studies with environmental history, the book examines how cuisines reflect social and political issues related to cultural representation, restaurants, and food sovereignty. Dr. G...
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Susan L. Carruthers, "Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

June 15, 2025 • 73 mins
Imagine a world in which clothing wasn't superabundant – cheap, disposable, indestructible – but perishable, threadbare and chronically scarce. Eighty years ago, when World War II ended, a textile famine loomed. What would everyone wear as uniforms were discarded and soldiers returned home, Nazi camps were liberated, and millions of uprooted people struggled to subsist? In Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar Worl...
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Giovanni Aloi, "Lawn" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

June 13, 2025 • 71 mins
A quintessential feature in Western gardens and landscaping, the lawn is now at the center of a climate change controversy. The large carbon footprint maintenance, its unquenchable thirst for fertilizers, weedkillers, and water, and the notorious unfriendliness towards all forms of wildlife have recently attracted criticism and even spurred an anti-lawn movement.Lawn (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Giovanni Aloi untangles the colonial-ca...
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Alison Griffiths, "Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film" (Columbia UP, 2025)

June 11, 2025 • 66 mins
From In Borneo, the Land of the Head-Hunters to The Epic of Everest to Camping Among the Indians, the early twentieth century was the heyday of expedition filmmaking. As new technologies transformed global transportation and opened new avenues for documentation, and as imperialism and capitalism expanded their reach, Western filmmakers embarked on journeys to places they saw as exotic, seeking to capture both the monumental and the...
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Sarah Bilston, "The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession" (Harvard UP, 2025)

June 11, 2025 • 55 mins
In 1818, a curious root arrived in a small English village, tucked—seemingly by accident—in a packing case mailed from Brazil. The amateur botanist who cultivated it soon realized that he had something remarkable on his hands: an exceptionally rare orchid never before seen on British shores. It arrived just as “orchid mania” was sweeping across Europe and North America, driving a vast plant trade that catered to wealthy private pat...
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Constant Willem Hijzen, "Roots of Counterterrorism: Contemporary Wisdom from Dutch Intelligence" (Oxford UP, 2024)

June 10, 2025 • 67 mins
It seems beyond doubt, since 9/11, that the main responsibility of intelligence and security services is to prevent ticking bombs from going off. The thing is, though, that the West has been confronted with international terrorism and domestic political violence throughout the 1970s as well. And although intelligence organizations countered terrorism, prevention did not become the name of the game. In a case study of the Netherland...
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Elise Franklin "Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration and the Limits of the Welfare State in France" (University of Nebraska Press, 2024)

June 10, 2025 • 78 mins
Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Elise Franklin whose first book, Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration and the Limits of the Welfare State in France, was published by the University of Nebraska Press (2024). Distintegrating Empire examines the processes of decolonization through the intersecting histories of the French welfare state, family migration from Algeria to France, and the French social workers who ...
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Julia Sneeringer, "West Germany: A Society in Motion, 1949-89" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

June 8, 2025 • 66 mins
Julia Sneeringer's book provides a concise overview of developments in the Federal Republic of Germany from the end of the Second World War and Germany's division, to the unification of East and West Germany in 1990. Within the framework of key political and economic moments, it illuminates how West Germans experienced social, economic, and cultural change across four decades. Chronologically structured and supplemented with timel...
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Sladja Blažan, "Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America" (University of Virginia Press, 2025)

June 8, 2025 • 53 mins
In Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America (University of Virginia Press, 2025), Dr. Sladja Blažan explains the foundational role of ghost stories in fostering the cultural imaginary, offering a medium for framing political ideologies, philosophical thought, racial anxieties, and social concerns. Ghosts and Their Hosts analyzes American ghost stories, considering their role as a settler colo...
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Jenn Hobbs, "Bodily Fluids, Fluid Bodies and International Politics: Feminist Technoscience, Biopolitics and Security" (Bristol University Press, 2024)

June 7, 2025 • 64 mins
In recent years, security actors have become increasingly concerned with health issues. Bodily Fluids, Fluid Bodies and International Politics: Feminist Technoscience, Biopolitics and Security (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jenn Hobbs reveals how understandings of race, sexuality and gender are produced/reproduced through healthcare policy. Analysing the plasma of paid Mexicana/o donors in the US, airport vomit in Ebola e...
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Brando Simeo Starkey, "Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System" (Doubleday, 2025)

June 6, 2025 • 62 mins
Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System (Doubleday, 2025) takes readers from the Civil War era to the present and describes how the Supreme Court, even more than the presidency or Congress, aligned with the enemies of Black progress to undermine the promise of the Constitution’s Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.The Reconstruction Amendments, w...
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Geoffrey Wawro, "The Vietnam War: A Military History" (Basic Books, 2024)

June 6, 2025 • 72 mins
The Vietnam War cast a shadow over the American psyche from the moment it began. In its time it sparked budget deficits, campus protests, and an erosion of US influence around the world. Long after the last helicopter evacuated Saigon, Americans have continued to battle over whether it was ever a winnable war. Based on thousands of pages of military, diplomatic, and intelligence documents, Geoffrey Wawro's The Vietnam War offers a...
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Claire Knight, "Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953" (Cornell UP, 2024)

June 5, 2025 • 86 mins
Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953 (Cornell UP, 2024) explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a...
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Matthew Shindell, "Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps and Matter" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

June 4, 2025 • 69 mins
The first book to combine exquisite cartographical charts of the Moon with a thorough exploration of the Moon’s role in popular culture, science, and myth. President John F. Kennedy’s rousing “We will go to the Moon” speech in 1961 before the US Congress catalyzed the celebrated Apollo program, spurring the US Geological Survey’s scientists to map the Moon. Over the next eleven years a team of twenty-two, including a dozen illustr...
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Roger Chickering, "The German Empire, 1871–1918" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

June 4, 2025 • 57 mins
Furious economic growth and social change resulted in pervasive civic conflict in Imperial Germany. Roger Chickering presents a wide-ranging history of this fractious period, from German national unification to the close of the First World War. Throughout this time, national unity remained an acute issue. It appeared to be resolved momentarily in the summer of 1914, only to dissolve in the war that followed. This volume examines th...
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Stephen R. Platt, "The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II" (Knopf, 2025)

June 3, 2025 • 73 mins
The extraordinary life of forgotten World War II hero Evans Carlson, commander of America’s first special forces, secret confidant of FDR, and one of the most controversial officers in the history of the Marine Corps, who dedicated his life to bridging the cultural divide between the United States and China“He was a gutsy old man.” “A corker,” said another. “You couldn’t find anyone better.” They talked about him in hushed tones. “...
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Serhii Plokhy, "The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine" (Basic Books, 2015)

June 3, 2025 • 90 mins
As Ukraine is embroiled in an ongoing struggle with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence, celebrated historian Serhii Plokhy explains that today's crisis is a case of history repeating itself: the Ukrainian conflict is only the latest in a long history of turmoil over Ukraine's sovereignty. Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Ukraine has been shaped by empires that exploi...
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