New Books in History

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+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Episodes

Robert G Parkinson, "Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier" (Norton, 2024)

July 14, 2026 • 32 mins
We are divided over the history of the United States, and one of the central dividing lines is the frontier. Was it a site of heroism? Or was it where the full force of an all-powerful empire was brought to bear on Native peoples? In this startingly original work Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier (Norton, 2024), historian Robert Parkinson presents a new account of ever-shifting enc...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Rod Phillips, "Cats: A History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)

July 13, 2026 • 58 mins
For more than 10,000 years, cats have prowled at the edges of human life. But, starting only a few decades ago, hundreds of millions of them became pets. In Cats: A History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Rod Phillips shares a sweeping cultural and social history of felines, tracing their shifting place across societies and centuries, from ancient Egypt's revered hunters to Europe's suspected familiars of w...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Jeffrey A. Marx, "Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I" (NYU Press, 2026)

July 13, 2026 • 38 mins
Why were Jews once stereotyped as America's arsonists? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Jeffrey Marx to discuss his fascinating book Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I (NYU Press, 2026), which uncovers a little-known chapter in the history of American antisemitism. In the decades after the American Civil War, major insurance companies instructed agents to den...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Peter C. Mancall, "Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680" (Oxford UP, 2026)

July 11, 2026 • 118 mins
In Contested Continent: The Struggle for America, c.1000-1680 (Oxford University Press, 2026), the newest installment of the acclaimed Oxford History of the United States series, Peter C. Mancall recounts how North America was forged from the experiences of millions of Indigenous women and men as well as Europeans and Africans. This history spans the continent from the North Atlantic to the West Ind...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Paul Helseth and David P. Smith eds., "New Perspectives on Old Princeton, 1812-1929" (Routledge, 2024)

July 9, 2026 • 44 mins
New Perspectives on Old Princeton, 1812-1929 (Routledge, 2024) focuses on Princeton Theological Seminary and the theologians who taught there from the time of its founding in 1812 to the time of its reorganization in 1929. It confronts the standard assessment of Old Princeton in the historiography of North American evangelicalism and sets out why a new paradigm is needed. The volume critically engages with the 'Ahlst...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Daniel Rood, "In the Shadow of the Great House: A History of the Plantation in America" (Norton, 2026)

July 7, 2026 • 81 mins
Dan Rood’s In the Shadow of the Great House (W.W. Norton & Co., 2026) is one of the first contemporary books to focus on the primary engine of slavery, race, and capitalism in this country: the plantation. The plantation was invented on the small Atlantic island of São Tomé in the 1500s, and the island also became the site, soon enough, of the first slave revolt. The brutal technology was then perfected in...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Gullah-Geechee Diasporas: Knowledge, Culture, and Black Lowcountry Legacies

July 7, 2026
Gullah-Geechee Diasporas: Knowledge, Culture, and Black Lowcountry Legacies (University of South Carolina Press, 2026) counters romantic portrayals of Gullah-Geechee culture as a static, geographically isolated remnant of the past. Across eight interdisciplinary essays, the book’s contributors trace an arc, described in time and space, from pre-Middle Passage Africa through the Caribbean and coastal United Stat...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Lauren Duval, "The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence" (UNC Press, 2025)

July 6, 2026 • 45 mins
What was it like to live in a city experiencing occupation by a foreign army? What did it mean when a family had to quarter an officer in their home? More specifically, how did military occupation affect the women and men who lived in those cities, and alter the gender system? Lauren Duval’s The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute a...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Ted Powell, "Churchill and the Crown" (Oxford UP, 2026)

July 6, 2026 • 39 mins
Winston Churchill was born in a palace and was given a funeral worthy of a king. His family had enjoyed an intimate association with the British monarchy stretching back centuries. As King Edward VIII said of him, 'I have never met anyone of royal blood who exemplified in such high degree the ideal of the 'good king.' Churchill and the Crown (Oxford University Press, 2026) tells the story of Churchill's relationship...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Stephen Robertson, "Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935" (Stanford UP, 2024)

July 6, 2026 • 57 mins
The violence that spread across Harlem on the night of March 19, 1935 was the first large-scale racial disorder in the United States in more than a decade and the first occurrence in the nation’s leading Black neighborhood. However, as many observers pointed out, the events were “not a race riot” of the kind that had marked the decades after the Civil War. Racial violence took a new form in 1935. Through a gran...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Xian Aubin Wang, "Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024" (Cornell UP, 2026)

July 3, 2026 • 63 mins
Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024 (Cornell University Press, 2026) by Dr. Xian Aubin Wang investigates decades of contentious relations between the Communist party-state of China and the Muslim community of southern Yunnan centered on the village of Shadian, site of an incident of state violence in 1975 that resulted in 1600 civilian deaths. Examining the causes and legacies of...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Thomas Paine at the Semiquincentennial: A Conversation with Gregory Claeys

July 1, 2026
Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Princeton University Press, 2026) is the first major new edition of Paine’s works, bringing together all his writings in six breathtaking volumes that dramatically revise our previous understanding of his activities as a writer and his importance as a democratic theorist in the age of revolutions. It includes about 180 new letters and some two hundred works newly attributed to Paine, wit...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Kate Dannies, "Conscripting Breadwinner Soldiers in the Late Ottoman Empire: Family, Law and War" (Edinburgh UP, 2026)

July 1, 2026 • 63 mins
Conscripting Breadwinner Soldiers in the Late Ottoman Empire: Family, Law and War (Edinburgh UP, 2026) by Dr. Kate Dannies examines the gender and family dimensions of mobilisation for the First World War in the Ottoman Empire, situating the war in a long-nineteenth-century social history of Ottoman military reform for the first time. It focuses on the military legal concept of muinsizlik (sole breadwinning) and how this conce...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Jonathan Schneer, "Nine Days in May: The General Strike Of 1926" (Oxford UP, 2026)

July 1, 2026 • 75 mins
In May, 1926, nearly three million British workers downed tools to support nearly one million of their countrymen, miners whose employers meant to lengthen their working day and cut their pay. This General Strike brought the country to a grinding halt - which, according to Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, represented a threat not merely to the nation but to the parliamentary system itself. For nine days, the world's bes...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Chiara Formichi, "Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia" (Stanford UP, 2025)

June 30, 2026 • 70 mins
In her most recent publication, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford UP, 2025), Chiara Formichi argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia's progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. While sidelined in the Dutch colonial project of hygienic modernity, women's la...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Christopher de Bellaigue, "The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King" (Bodley Head, 2025)

June 29, 2026 • 46 mins
What does a 16th century ruler reveal about the nature of power, past and present? Istanbul, 1538. The greatest of the Ottoman Sultans is at the pinnacle of world power, while his family and future are at the mercy of their own dynastic law: whichever of his five sons succeeds him must eventually kill all the others. So why not get a head start?For the next fifteen years, as Suleyman the Magnificent and his terrifying pirate ...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Fred S. Naiden, "Railroaded: A Motorman’s Story of the New York City Subway" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

June 29, 2026 • 34 mins
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 1980s in New York City, however, he was New York City Transit Authority Employee number 4046. He cleaned subway platforms and restrooms, drove subways and locomotives, and belonged to Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union. All of these experiences inform his book, Railroaded: A M...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

John Kapusta, "Self-Realization Nation: How Artists of the Creative Counterculture Made a New America" (U California Press, 2026)

June 28, 2026 • 43 mins
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 unexpected group of performing artists who led one of the most influential artistic movements in contemporary American history. After World War II, personal fulfillment emerged as a defining American cultural ideal. Self-realization--the quest to become our authentic selv...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Thomas S. Mullaney, "How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information" (W. W. Norton, 2026)

June 28, 2026 • 76 mins
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 discipline, and the work we are discussing today, I believe, will serve as the perfect bridge from Tom’s historical scholarship to the wider, reading public. We are discussing Tom’s latest book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W.W. Norton, 2026). Tom&...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Fabio Lanza, "Urban Revolution: People's Communes in Beijing" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

June 27, 2026 • 61 mins
During the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), the collectivization of the Chinese countryside had catastrophic results, but how did this short-lived political experiment reshape urban life? In his new book, Urban Revolution: People's Communes in Beijing (Cambridge UP, 2026), Fabio Lanza examines the most radical attempts to remake cities under Mao. This first full-length history in English of China's urban ...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Popular Podcasts

    Hey Jonas!

    Hey Jonas!

    Hey Jonas! The official Jonas Brothers podcast. Hosted by Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas. It’s the Jonas Brothers you know... musicians, actors, and well, yes, brothers. Now, they’re sharing another side of themselves in the playful, intimate, and irreverent way only they can. Spend time with the Jonas Brothers here and stay a little bit longer for deep conversations like never before.

    Stuff You Should Know

    Stuff You Should Know

    If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.

    Dateline NBC

    Dateline NBC

    Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

    Betrayal Weekly

    Betrayal Weekly

    Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.

    The Joe Rogan Experience

    The Joe Rogan Experience

    The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.

Advertise With Us
Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

Explore

iHeart

Live Radio

Podcasts

Artist Radio

Exclusives

News

Features

Events

Contests

Photos

Information

About

Advertise

Blog

Brand Guidelines

Contest Guidelines

Subscription Offers

Jobs

Get the App

Automotive

Home

Wearables

© 2026 iHeartMedia, Inc.

  • Help
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • AdChoicesAd Choices