Conversations in World History

Wolf Gruner is a professor of history at USC-Dornsife, chair of Jewish Studies, and author of the recently published book Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany. We discuss his book as well as the state of Holocaust Studies. 

Wolf recommends two other books on the Holocaust for a general reader:

David Engel's The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews

Marion Kaplan's Between Dignity and Despair: Jewi...

Sarah Clunis is the Curator of African Collections at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Dr. Clunis has taught art history for over twenty years at public universities and historically Black colleges and universities. Her research and classes have focused on the history of African art and the display of African objects in Western museum settings. 

Host: David Sherrin

Learn about him at davidsherrin.com or @david_writer.she...

John Schwaller is a scholar of early colonial Latin America, and of Nahuatl and the Nahua (the Aztec language and people) Dr. Schwaller is the author of five books and the editor of three others. Matthew Restall is a Colonial Latin American Historian with areas of specialization in Yucatan and Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, Maya history, the Spanish Conquest, and Africans in Spanish America. He has published thirty books and eighty ...

John Schwaller is a scholar of early colonial Latin America, and of Nahuatl and the Nahua (the Aztec language and people) Dr. Schwaller is the author of five books and the editor of three others. Matthew Restall is a Colonial Latin American Historian with areas of specialization in Yucatan and Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, Maya history, the Spanish Conquest, and Africans in Spanish America. He has published thirty books and eighty ...

John Schwaller is a scholar of early colonial Latin America, and of Nahuatl and the Nahua (the Aztec language and people) Dr. Schwaller is the author of five books and the editor of three others. Matthew Restall is a Colonial Latin American Historian with areas of specialization in Yucatan and Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, Maya history, the Spanish Conquest, and Africans in Spanish America. He has published thirty books and eighty ...

I speak with Joseph Sassoon, Professor and Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies of Georgetown University. Joseph is also the author of the recent book The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire. A NYTimes review of the book can be found here. We discuss the fascinating Sassoon family, a conversation that takes us from 19th century Baghdad to Mumbai and then to Shanghai and England. The fort...

In this Teacher's Corner episode, I speak with Nora Schaffer, a social studies teacher in Brooklyn, NY. Nora has a fascinating background in art history, anthropology, and restaurant management. She is now pursuing a PhD in education at Columbia University's Teachers College and we discuss how she brings all her various expertise to the classroom. Additionally, we talk about ways to make the learning of WWI relevant and engaging fo...

Peter Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. We discuss the two dynasties --T'ang and Sung-- that rule China from about 618-1279 CE. We talk about why this period is important for Chinese and World History and the conversation ranges from what the high school textbook gets right and wrong to Neo-Confucianism to Chinese minorities and the introduction of foot-binding...

Liz Clarke is a South African illustrator who has been the artist behind seven graphic histories from Oxford University Press including Abina and the Important Men and Witness to the Age of Revolution, both of which have been discussed on the podcast. We talk about the process of making graphic histories and the challenges in creating a visual representation of the past. We discuss the collaboration between the historian and the il...

Marie Favereau is Associate Professor of History at Paris Nanterre University. We discuss her book The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, which was shortlisted for the Cundhill Prize for the best history writing in English. The Khanate of the Golden Horde was the empire ruled by Chinggis Khan's descendants in Russia and Central Asia. Marie explains how the Mongol Empire was unique, the values of a nomadic civilization, and t...

Andrew Porwancher is a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma who teaches courses in Constitutional Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in history from Cambridge. We discuss his book The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, which won the Journal of the American Revolution Book-of-the-Year Award. Andrew has held research fellowships at a number of universities, including Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford. In 2017, Porwancher won th...

Today I speak with Adam Hochschild, journalist, lecturer at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and author of eleven books. American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis is his most recent. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa and To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 were both selected as finalists for the National Book Cri...

Today I’m speaking with Professor Christopher Ebert of Brooklyn College and Professor Thiago Kause of UNIRIO, which is the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. They are co-authoring a book about the history of the city of Salvador da Bahia, the first capital of colonial Brazil. Chris was my master’s thesis advisor about a decade ago and he previously wrote a book called Between Empires: Brazilian Sugar in the Early Atlantic Econom...