New Books in History

Episode

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  Beronda L. Montgomery, "When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy" (Henry Holt & Co.) 18.08.2026 44mnt

  The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely.In When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy (Henry Holt & Co.), award-winning plant biologist Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery explores the ways seven trees—as well as the cotton shrub—are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants.Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer. Beronda L. Montgomery, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and scholar who pursues a common theme of understanding how individuals perceive, respond to, and are impacted by the environments in which they exist. Her primary laboratory-based research has been focused on the responses of photosynthetic organisms (i.e., plants and cyanobacteria) to external light cues. Additionally, Beronda pursues this theme in the context of effective mentoring and leadership of individuals, and the role of innovative leaders in supporting success. You can find her at her website. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Jeana Jorgensen, "Sex Education 101: Approachable Essays on Folklore, Culture, & History" (Fox Folk Press, 2023) 17.08.2026 44mnt

  Do you look back at your sex ed classes and wonder WTF?! Are you a parent looking at your kid’s curriculum and asking the same question? Sex Education 101: Approachable Essays on Folklore, Culture, & History (Fox Folk Press, 2023) is less of a how-to of sex education and more of a why. Why does abstinence-only sex ed receive so much federal funding? Why do instructors show gross images of STIs to scare students? The answers, believe it or not, have a lot to do with folklore. Folklore—informally transmitted traditional culture—has a lot to say about sex. And it is often people’s first point of contact with information and messages about sex. Folklore encompasses urban legends, moral panics, and rumors, which influenced early U.S. policies around sex, and also includes jokes, raunchy folk songs, and beliefs and slang about menstruation or STIs. And thus, folklore shapes sex ed classrooms and school sex ed policies. Jeana Jorgensen earned her PhD in folklore at Indiana University. She is a lecturer in anthropology at Butler University and part of the editorial team at Marvel's & Tales. Her books include Folklore 101 (2021), Fairy Tales 101 (2022), and Sex Education 101 (2023), and her work has appeared in the Journal of American Folklore, Fabula, Journal of Folklore Research, and elsewhere. Rachel Hopkin PhD is a folklorist and audio producer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Edward E. Andrews, "Newport Gardner's Anthem: A Story of Slavery, Struggle, and Survival in Early America" (Cornell UP, 2025) 17.08.2026 47mnt

  Newport Gardner's Anthem: A Story of Slavery, Struggle, and Survival in Early America (Cornell UP, 2025) explores the remarkable life of Occramer Marycoo, an enslaved African who went on to become one of early America's most important Black leaders.  In the mid-eighteenth century, Marycoo was taken from West Africa to Newport, Rhode Island, where he was forced into racial bondage and given a name that symbolized the power that his new city and new enslaver held over him: Newport Gardner. In this powerful book, Edward E. Andrews pieces together newspaper articles, church records, letters, and Gardner's own writings to tell the story of his life. After acquiring his freedom via a winning lottery ticket in 1791, Gardner became a kind of Founding Father for Newport's free Black community. He established and led several Black benevolent organizations that helped the community navigate the complicated waters of freedom as Rhode Island slowly began the process of emancipation. He became a popular educator to young Black Newporters, and also emerged as a key religious figure, serving as a long-standing pillar of Newport's First Congregational Church and later founding an independent Black church in the 1820s. His final act was leading a group of about three dozen Black New Englanders to Liberia, in hopes that a new start in Africa would be better than the discrimination they faced in America. A richly textured account, Newport Gardner's Anthem tells the story of a forgotten Black leader while exploring the new, but tragically limited, opportunities for formerly enslaved people in the post-Revolutionary world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Sarah Ellen Zarrow, "Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941" (Cornell UP, 2025.) 14.08.2026 1j 2mnt

  Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941 (Cornell UP, 2025.) illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists, who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil. As Jews comfortable in the Polish language and within Polish artistic and academic society, they saw themselves as intermediaries between less-integrated Jews and the Polish cultural elite. At the turn of the century, Jewish ethnographers and museum creators staked their claim to belonging to the civic nation though the display of Jewish folk art, fine art, and Judaica. After the First World War, the nearly three million Jews in the Second Polish Republic were suddenly challenged with finding a place for themselves in a state that increasingly defined itself as a creation of the ethnic Polish nation, to which Jews, by many accounts, did not belong. By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers a better understanding of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. This is not a case of assimilation, nor of acculturation, but rather of displaying a parallel culture that was at once similar and yet distinctive. Displays of Belonging offers a nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of ways in which Jews in Poland saw their present and dreamed of their future. It places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context, and sheds light on ways in which ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in the space of museums.  Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. Book here Faculty page here Email & Social Media: plerner@usc.edu @plerner.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  William Whyte, "The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood" (Harvard UP, 2026) 11.08.2026 42mnt

  We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what springs to mind are not just lofty concepts but also material realities: cramped dorm rooms and musty library stacks, gothic towers and freshly mowed quads. The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood (Harvard University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at the center of the institution’s 900-year history. Constructing each chapter around an emblematic material—straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk, paper, iron, and concrete—Professor William Whyte traces the intimate connections between the university’s shifting physical form and its evolving social and cultural meanings. From the medieval University of Paris, where students purchased bundles of straw to use as chairs in otherwise-unfurnished classrooms, to the ocean of concrete at postcolonial Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, Professor Whyte shows how competing visions of higher learning left their imprint on generations of university architecture, landscaping, and furniture. Along the way, he highlights perennial fears that, within the social space of the university, the life of the mind would recede before worldly interests: that student bloodlines would be tainted by racial intermixing, that courting donors with buildings named in their honor would become more important than research and education, that the allure of powdered wigs and silk gowns would undermine scholarly discipline. A richly textured chronicle, The University concludes that, even in the age of remote learning, the college campus is irreplaceable. The future of higher education includes fiber-optic cables, but stone, brick, and steel are here to stay. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Thomas F. Rzeznik, "A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City" (NYU Press, 2026) 11.08.2026 33mnt

  St. Vincent's Hospital began with a simple, but radical mission: to care for all those in need regardless of race, creed, or financial means. For more than 160 years, the hospital carried out that work, serving notables and the nameless alike, from impoverished immigrants and those stricken by devastating nineteenth-century epidemics to AIDS patients and the victims of the attacks of 9/11. A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City (NYU Press, 2026) provides the first comprehensive history of this remarkable institution, from its humble beginnings in 1849 to its abrupt closure in 2010. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, St. Vincent's earned distinction not only for the quality of its medical programs, but also for its unwavering dedication to the poor. The hospital was a testament to the vision and labor of the Sisters of Charity, who founded, staffed, and administered the hospital with remarkable skill and devotion. This captivating account documents St. Vincent's growth into one of the largest and most prominent Catholic medical centers in the United States, as well as its struggles to sustain its religious mission within the ever-changing and increasingly competitive medical marketplace. A Monument to Charity highlights the immense contributions of Catholic sisters to health care in the United States as well as the enduring legacy of all those who worked alongside them to care for the sick and alleviate suffering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  David N. Gellman, "Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York" (Cornell UP, 2022) 10.08.2026 49mnt

  Edward Blum interviews David N. Gellman on his book Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York (Cornell UP, 2022). In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic.Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice.John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles. The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Stefan Al, "Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home" (Norton, 2026) 09.08.2026 30mnt

  A sweeping history of humanity’s most fundamental creation―the home―and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves. Americans spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds of that time spent in their homes. Globally, the construction and maintenance of residential buildings account for a staggering portion of carbon emissions. In this timely and fascinating work, architect and urban-planning scholar Stefan Al deftly weaves together archaeology, engineering, social history, and environmental science to explain how our homes have developed through the ages and in turn shaped civilization and the planet itself. From tiny pit-houses in the Levant and Mesoamerica thousands of years ago to soaring skyscrapers in Dubai, New York, and Shanghai today, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) takes readers on a swift and absorbing tour of the evolution of human habitation. Whisking readers from ancient Pompeii to contemporary Hong Kong, industrial-age Liverpool to postwar Levittown, Al shows how our choices in housing have both reflected and affected ideas about gender roles, privacy, and comfort. Discover how seemingly mundane elements―like door-knockers and corridors―have altered everyday interactions, and how material choices have remade the planet’s surface. He also confronts the darker side of domesticity, exposing the unintended consequences of our architectural choices across millennia, including smoke-filled Neolithic dwellings, deadly fires in crowded Roman apartment buildings, and worsening social isolation in car-dependent suburbs. Finally, he examines the myths and reality of future housing, including 3D-printed homes and space architecture built by robots. Drawing from personal experiences across global cities and professional insights, Al illuminates how our choices in housing continue to influence everything from social relationships to climate change, ultimately arguing that understanding this rich history is crucial for building a more sustainable future. With billions more people needing housing in the coming decades, Dwelling on Earth reveals how we might transform humanity’s defining challenge into our greatest opportunity. HOST BIO: Alex Hallbom is an urban planner and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Yana Skorobogatov, "Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union" (U Chicago Press, 2026) 08.08.2026 1j

  In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Yana Skorobogatov about her book, Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union (University of Chicago Press, 2026). From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly 40,000 citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands introduces readers to the many citizens in this period—women and men of all ages and backgrounds—who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness. Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. The book is a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Max Perry Mueller, "Wakara's America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West" (Basic Books, 2025) 07.08.2026 1j 20mnt

  In the mid-19th century, anyone who was anyone in the American West had heard of the Ute leader Wakara. Yet, by the early twenty first century, his story has been, if not forgotten, at the very least twisted and distorted into something that would have been unrecognizable to him and his contemporaries. In Wakara's America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books, 2025), University of Nebraska religious studies professor Max Perry Mueller not only sets the record straight on Wakara, his life, and his times, but also explains how and why his narrative grew to be so misused. It's a story of public history gone wrong, of grave robbing and NAGPRA, and above all about the complexities and contingencies of history. Mueller makes a convincing case that our understanding of Utah and the broader West has been incomplete without Wakara near the center of the story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Matthew Pinsker, "Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln" (Norton, 2026) 05.08.2026 1j 12mnt

  We know Abraham Lincoln as the eloquent, compassionate leader of a nation torn by civil war. But he had another, less visible side, equally central to his character and leadership: Lincoln was a master of party politics. Schooled as a Whig in the rough-and-tumble of Illinois electioneering in the 1830s, Lincoln skillfully navigated treacherous partisan crosscurrents and helped build the Republican party into a viable force. His decades of experience as a party leader proved invaluable to him as president and commander in chief during the Civil War. Matthew Pinsker’s groundbreaking Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln (W.W. Norton & Company, 2026) draws extensively on Lincoln’s private correspondence to move beyond the marble icon and realize a flesh-and-blood character in Boss Lincoln. Behind closed doors he was shrewd and insistent, capable of deft manipulation, blunt intimidation, or thoughtful argument as needed. As a decision-maker he was attentive to detail but kept his own counsel and trusted his own acumen. His aides noted that in cabinet meetings Lincoln had the final say, and “there is no cavil.” Devoted to elections, he kept careful, handwritten tallies of party turnout, even gifting one to Mary Todd, another partisan, during their courtship. His hymn to democracy at Gettysburg in 1863 carried a partisan message to the political leaders gathered there: The fight for the union would take place at the polls as well as on the battlefield. Boss Lincoln often sacrificed candor for purpose. He used his White House meeting with Frederick Douglass in 1864, ostensibly about emancipation, to send a message to radicals about his need for their support. With emancipation and the war’s outcome at stake, facing withering criticism from all sides, Lincoln won reelection by building a new political coalition through the Union party. Here was Boss Lincoln at his height, captured in absorbing detail in this indelible portrait of our greatest president. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Blair L.M. Kelley, "Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days" (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) 04.08.2026

  For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished. Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) brings together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their contributions to the making of America be fully recognized. Blair L.M. Kelley, Ph.D. is a renowned author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. She is the seventh president of the National Humanities Center, the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Blair previously held senior leadership roles at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of the American South and at North Carolina State University where she served as Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Affairs and Partnerships and the Alumni Graduate Professor of History. You can find her on all social platforms @profblmkelley. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, "Seeking Freedom in Indian Country: Slavery, Sovereignty, and Resistance Within the Five Tribes, 1790–1861" (LSU Press, 2026) 03.08.2026 45mnt

  Dr. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel’s Seeking Freedom in Indian Country: Slavery, Sovereignty, and Resistance within the Five Tribes, 1790–1861 (LSU Press, 2026) is the first comprehensive study of African chattel slavery within the Five Tribes: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations. Dr. Oertel examines how chattel slavery functioned among all Five Tribes before and during the removal process, how the tribes reconstituted slavery post-removal in Indian Territory, and how enslaved Black people promoted freedom-seeking strategies at each stage. Furthermore, her work considers how the conflict over slavery in Indian Territory contributed to the larger national debate over slavery’s fate on the eve of the Civil War. Historians have examined how the practice of African enslavement emerged within one or two tribes, how forced migration affected slavery within particular nations, and how the debate over slavery divided multiple Indigenous nations. Dr. Oertel, however, is the first to examine Indian Territory as a whole, its significance to the sectional debates, and its role as an incubator of emancipation policies in the United States. Knitting together these individual tribal narratives and supplementing them with extensive primary research on how slavery functioned across Indian Territory, she integrates Indian country into the antebellum march toward the Civil War. Seeking Freedom in Indian Country joins a rising chorus of studies that integrate southern and western history, which, by default, also pulls together the history of the so-called Indian Wars with the Civil War. Dr. Oertel suggests that we cannot fully understand the causes of the Civil War without also considering the changes brought about by the forced removal of Indians. She argues that settler colonialism and the expansion of African chattel slavery together set the stage for sectional conflict to explode in the West. Ironically, both Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism and Black resistance to slavery challenged white supremacy in ways that foretold the end of slavery but also furthered the settler colonial project. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Emily Sneff, "When the Declaration of Independence Was News" (Oxford UP, 2026) 03.08.2026 43mnt

  Amy Weitzman interviews Emily Sneff on her new book When the Declaration of Independence Was News and the graduate school experience. In 1776 people could hear the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in public squares and could read it in the pages of their local newspapers. Stories of the Declaration typically recount the work that took place inside the Continental Congress, focusing on the men tasked with drafting the text. Although Congress declared independence, the work of spreading the news involved printers, post riders, ship captains, civic leaders, soldiers, clerks, orators, preachers, diplomats, and translators. When the Declaration of Independence Was News reveals the stories behind how the Declaration was communicated in the United States and around the Atlantic. Tracing the travels of the founding document of the United States from Philadelphia to New York, Boston, Charleston, London, Leiden, Paris, and beyond, Emily Sneff shows how people both celebrated the Declaration and critiqued it. In the weeks after the document was penned, it was printed in the columns of newspapers, translated into German and French, and shared with Native American allies. The document induced some people to make public their privately held beliefs about whether they wanted the United States to be independent or to reconcile with King George III. The Declaration was met with unique circumstances everywhere it went, and people modified the text along the way. The questions of who experienced the news of independence, when, and how reveal an expansive and complex history of a critical moment in the American Revolution. Published for the 250th anniversary of American independence, When the Declaration of Independence Was News returns to a time before the legacy of these words and the outcome of the war against Great Britain were known to reconsider what the founding of the United States meant to the people who were living through it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Virginia McGee Richards, "The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway" (MIT Press, 2026) 01.08.2026 33mnt

  Some of the earliest canals in colonial America, referred to as the Inner Passage, were constructed by enslaved people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 1700s. In a paradox of history, for over a hundred years enslaved Black people used these canals, constructed for white plantation owners, to travel southward to freedom in Spanish Florida. In The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway (MIT Press, 2026), Virginia McGee Richards documents the lost narrative of the Inner Passage through 60 extraordinary photographs of landscapes altered by slavery and portraits of Lowcountry descendants, along with an essay describing her discovery of this untold history. In an accompanying essay, Imani Perry writes about her own journey on the Inner Passage, putting Black resistance to enslavement and Southern history into an immediate context. James Estrin brings decades of insight about photography and the power of visual storytelling to his affecting foreword. Together, these words and images offer a powerful living map of history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Vaneesa Cook, "Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks" (Beacon Press, 2026) 01.08.2026 46mnt

  In Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks (Beacon Press, 2026), historian Dr. Vaneesa Cook examines the history of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty in order to consider, more broadly, the United States' relationship with liberty and empire. Empire and liberty have been part of the American story since the founding, but they are often at odds, sometimes irreconcilably so. Cook examines their changing relationship and meaning using these two iconic buildings as anchors. She also examines the symbolism and importance of the landmarks themselves. She considers how individuals and groups who have had more limited access to liberty have tried to shape the meaning of the symbols and their own rights at the same time. In telling this sweeping history, Cook touches in themes of American identity and ideals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Murat C. Yildiz, "The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul" (U Texas Press, 2026) 31.07.2026 1j 5mnt

  The history of sports in Turkey is deeply contested. Over the decades, journalists, pundits, non-professional historians, sports scholars, and everyday people have offered competing narratives about the origins of modern sports in the late Ottoman Empire.  In The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas Press, 2026), Murat Cihan Yıldız tells the story of how Istanbul’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews—gymnastics teachers, football coaches, weightlifters, journalists, athletes, and fans—created a gendered and class-stratified civic project that promoted athletics as a source of fun, beauty, and moral education. Influenced by the emerging global vogue for organized sports, all boys from the expanding middle class of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial capital were expected to exercise and compete on the playing field in order to develop into moral men. Yet even as the embrace of modern athletics transcended ethnoreligious divisions, it did not erase them. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Yıldız shows that sportsmen created new communal boundaries in team affiliations, fandom, and sports media. Adeptly reconstructing Istanbul’s imperial culture as it was experienced more than a century ago, The Ottoman World of Sports recovers a lived imperial culture whose defining features were shaped by its multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual sportsmen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, "Parallel Journeys: Eurasian History Through Travelers’ Eyes (400 BCE–1936 CE)" (Cambria, 2025) 31.07.2026 41mnt

  Parallel Journeys: Eurasian History through Travelers’ Eyes (Cambria Press, 2026) is a comparative history of Eurasia told through travel writing and cross-cultural encounters. In this anthology, Anthony Barbieri pairs accounts from twenty-eight travelers across different historical periods, placing side-by-side travelers looking or going East with those looking or going West. Spanning from 400 BCE through to 1936, the anthology brings together ambassadors, monks, missionaries, merchants, and journalists in order to explore how people understood the cultures, societies, and worlds that they encountered through travel. Structured around these “parallel journeys,” the book highlights both similarities and differences in the ways travelers described foreign places and peoples. Some travelers used these encounters to criticize the societies they entered, while others turned outward observation into reflection on their own cultures. Across the anthology, travel writing emerges not simply as a way of describing a journey, but as a way of forging ideas about cultural difference, identity, religion, commerce, and political power. This anthology will appeal to readers interested in Eurasian history, travel writing, world literature, and cross-cultural exchange. It is also a flexible and engaging anthology perfect for classroom teaching, complete with both long and short versions of each account, helpful visuals, and contextual information — an excellent way to get students thinking about what it means to do comparison effectively. For another overview of the anthology, readers should check out Barbieri’s lecture “Beyond the Mountains and Seas,” available on YouTube here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Steven K. Green, "American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism" (Oxford UP, 2026) 29.07.2026

  Today I'm speaking with Steven K. Green, Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and Affiliated Professor of History and Religious Studies at Willamette University. We are discussing his book, American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2026). Since the first permanent Protestant settlement in Jamestown in 1607, Protestant Christianity has waxed and waned through a series of revivals, migrations, and challenges from alternative faiths like Catholicism and Mormonism. The Gilded Age, from roughly 1870 to 1900, was a unique period for Protestantism in American history. Most Americans still subscribed to a Protestant faith, though threats began to arise not from other confessions, but rather from philosophical and scientific challengers. The so-called freethinkers represented a broad range of beliefs and ideas, being united by a mutual skepticism of religious conservatism and traditional sexual and gender mores. American Infidelity tells the story of this tug-of-war for the soul of a nation, with Christianity on one side and the legacy of thinkers like Thomas Paine on the other. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Anna Lively, "Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923" (Oxford UP, 2026) 28.07.2026 19mnt

  Anna Lively is a historian of modern Ireland, Britain, and Russia. Awarded her PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh in 2022, she is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of Strathclyde. Prior to this she held the Roy Foster Irish Government Research Fellowship in the History and Culture of Ireland at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and was a Teaching Fellow in Modern History at the University of Aberdeen. She has published in multiple journals on the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and on the Irish Save the Children Fund. From the late nineteenth century, Ireland featured prominently in Russian liberal, conservative, and radical debates about land politics, self-determination, and empire. Equally, Irish commentators from across the political spectrum used Russia as a lens onto questions of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. But while the Irish and Russian revolutionary contexts are well-studied in isolation, their myriad political, social, and cultural entanglements are not.Drawing on extensive Russian and Irish archival accounts, newspapers, diaries, letters, memoirs, literary, and visual sources, Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923 (Oxford UP, 2026) looks in both directions at Irish responses to Russian revolutionary change and at representations of Ireland in Russian-language texts from the 1905 Russian Revolution to the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. The result is a unique account of international engagement in revolutionary Russia and Ireland and of how Ireland was imagined beyond the Anglophone world. This mutual, if selective and conditional, engagement reflected wider technological changes in news communication and the expansion of international news agencies. Diasporic networks, including in Britain and the US, helped to shape Russo-Irish relations and Irish publications and political actors engaged with different parts of the Russian empire, including Ukraine, Finland, and Poland.Through five thematic chapters, the book considers Russo-Irish relations from contrasting and often overlooked angles, including Irish eyewitness experiences on the Eastern front during World War One and religious perspectives. Using a transnational methodology and expansive source base, the book offers a fresh angle on the entangled history of revolutions in the early twentieth century and the translation of news and ideas across borders. Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905–1923 will be published in September 2026 with Oxford University Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history