New Books in History

ตอน

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  David L Hoffmann, "Women, Gender, and Socialist Ideology in Soviet Russia" (Routledge, 2026) 18.09.2026 56นาที

  Women, Gender, and Socialist Ideology in Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2026) examines the place of women in Soviet Russia from the 1917 Revolution through the post-World War II period, discussing how the Soviet construction of gender perpetuated inequality even as it dramatically expanded women’s roles in society. Chapters of this book explore Bolshevik activists’ ideals of women’s liberation and their failure to realize these ideals; the significance of women’s labor to the Soviet economy, alongside continued workplace discrimination; state reproductive policies and essentialist understandings of femininity; women’s World War II military service and representations of gender in postwar commemorations; and the role of socialist ideology in the formation of the Soviet system and Stalinist culture. Throughout, Hoffmann places Soviet history in its international context, including comparisons of Soviet women’s social positions with those of their counterparts in other countries. The book makes clear the centrality of the Soviet gender order to the country’s social, cultural, and political history, as well as providing an important historical case for understanding the broader struggle for women’s equality. Intended for students and scholars alike, this book is a valuable resource for all those interested in gender history, Soviet history, labor history, and World War II. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan, "The Precarious Past in Premodern Java" (University of California Press, 2026) 15.09.2026 1ชม. 10นาที

  The practice of history in premodern Java was profoundly influenced by precarious conditions of textual production and preservation: fragile manuscripts perished in the tropical environment, archival records were scattered far afield, and historical memories faded over many generations. InThe Precarious Past in Premodern Java, Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan examines how Javanese societies between the fifth and fifteenth centuries CE responded with distinctive strategies to record and transmit knowledge of the past. Drawing on sources in Javanese, Sanskrit, Malay, and related languages from the Indonesian archipelago, Sastrawan provides a detailed account of diverse forms of history making in premodern Java, reconstructing a dynamic culture in which written and nonwritten modes of transmission coexisted and intersected. By situating these practices within broader discussions of global historiography, this book challenges modern assumptions about what counts as “history” and illuminates how societies have developed different ways of preserving and remembering the past. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit here to learn more. Dr Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan is a historian, lecturer and DECRA research fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Tom Hulme, "Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life Before Gay Liberation" (Cornell UP, 2026) 15.09.2026 48นาที

  Professor Tom Hulme's second book reconstructs the erotic and romantic lives of queer men in Belfast across roughly seventy years, from the recriminalisation of sex between men in the 1880s to the emergence of a mainstream public debate about homosexuality in the 1950s. It follows men cruising the city centre, reading and passing around homosexual novels, forging relationships across the lines of class and religion, and navigating a world that was often more knowing and more tolerant than Northern Ireland's later reputation would suggest. Where we might expect only shame and fear, Hulme finds pride, defiance, and a guarded everyday acceptance, though one whose limits fell hard on those caught with much younger partners, and one that narrowed sharply after the Second World War. Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life Before Gay Liberation (Cornell UP, 2026) is built from two very different archives, the criminal record of some sixty Belfast court cases and shaped by the violence of policing, and the extraordinary personal diaries of David Strain, forty-three volumes and perhaps two million words, brought into scholarly use here for the first time. Out of that pairing Hulme develops the book's broader argument, a case for intimate, emotionally invested methods in the history of sexuality, and two organising ideas: the "intimate queer city," in which Belfast's very scale and familiarity shaped how men met and loved, and the "queer Irish world," which places sailors, the docks, and migration between Belfast, Liverpool, and New York at the centre of the story. Along the way the book takes up religion and respectability, masculinity on trial, and the entanglement of queerness with the ethnonational and sectarian order of Ulster. Belfastmen is published open access by Cornell University Press and can be read for free through the Cornell Open initiative. About the author Tom Hulme is a professor at Queen's University Belfast and a cultural historian of modern Britain and Ireland. He is Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council project Queer Northern Ireland: Sexuality Before Liberation, run with Professor Leanne McCormick, and the author of After the Shock City: Urban Culture. His work on queer history has appeared in Irish Historical Studies, The History of the Family, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and his research has been covered in the Guardian and the Irish Times. About the host Niall Herron is a PhD researcher in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast. His ethnographic work examines queer experience during the Northern Ireland Troubles, taking the everyday as a focal point for how queerness and space were assembled across the period, and how sexuality, gender, region, ethnonational identity, and class were bound up together. His writing has appeared in the anthropology journal Ethnos and the academic queer history blog NOTCHES. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Ciara Breathnach, "Absence in the Archives" (Cambridge UP, 2026) 13.09.2026 46นาที

  Ciara Breathnach is Professor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork. She has published widely on Irish socio-economic, gender, cultural and health history. Her last monograph Ordinary lives, death and social class: Dublin City Coroner’s Court, 1876-1902 (Oxford University Press, 2022) won the American Conference of Irish Studies, James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences in 2023.   In this interview she discusses her new book Absence in the Archives (Cambridge UP, 2026).  Absence in official records can have profound implications for social memory, civil rights, restorative and transitional justice, citizenship, social welfare, and redress for historical abuse. Scholars of archivistics and early modern New World imperial contexts have uncovered the epistemological problems that archival silences pose for historical research, and the author contends that absence deserves separate conceptual treatment. Archival absences, both permanent and temporary, have particular resonances for postcolonial countries, and are an ongoing threat under totalitarian regimes. Using Britain and Ireland as primary examples, this Element traces how absence took root in the domestic and subsequently the colonial archive, and how through legal mechanisms it became an accepted part of archival praxis. The aim of this Element is to raise awareness of archival absence in order to prevent more losses, particularly in the abundance of the digital age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.  Absence in the Archives was recently published with Cambridge University Press, as part of their Elements short book series.  Aidan Beatty teaches in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Ulices Piña, "Rebellious Citizens: Social Upheaval and Democracy in Revolutionary Mexico (U Nebraska Press, 2026) 13.09.2026 45นาที

  In Rebellious Citizens: Social Upheaval and Democracy in Revolutionary Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2026), Ulices Piña shows that democracy in Mexico has never been the exclusive domain of elites, nor confined to the ballot box. Focusing on the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, Piña explores how citizens forged a substantive democratic culture in the crucible of three successive social upheavals that shook the established social order in the central western state of Jalisco during the 1920s and 1930s—a formative period in the nation’s political history. Piña examines how ordinary Mexicans actively shaped the political process, made their own history, and fought for equality in the country’s long fight for democracy. The long-term effects of the recurring uprisings in Jalisco were central to the new political system produced by the postrevolutionary state: After each rebellion, authorities consolidated institutional power, elected officials debated the strictures of government, and ordinary people grappled with the promise and limits of political emancipation. Because of the contradictions that arose from the creation of this modern political system, especially those that emerged at the nexus of democratic inclusion and authoritarian rule, seemingly powerless populations claimed equality, exercised participation rights, and demanded respect, even amid the violence and surveillance the state deployed against marginal groups to achieve its goals. Rebellious Citizens brings into focus the struggles of ordinary people to experiment with new ways of doing politics to remake the nation. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Isabela Seong Leong Quintana, "Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles" (UNC Press, 2026) 12.09.2026 48นาที

  Los Angeles in the late nineteenth century was bustling with the rise of industrialization, but the growing labor force that propelled it, mostly consisting of Mexican and Chinese men, was met with exclusion policies and deportation campaigns. Nevertheless, Chinese and Mexican women, children, and men built vibrant residential and business districts—until they were all but eradicated in the 1930s. In her compelling and textured history, Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles, Dr. Isabela Seong Leong Quintana unearths the entwined stories of Chinatown and Sonoratown through the everyday lives of their residents. In this conversation, we talk about the significance of comparative Latinx and Asian American Studies, the importance of spatial analysis in urban history, and the methodological challenges of locating Mexican and Chinese women and children in the archives.  Dr. Quintana is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, with affiliations in Culture & Theory and Chicané/Latiné Studies. Her work explores the interconnected histories of Asian Americans and Chicanés/Latinés, centering women and children within U.S. borderlands and recovering unarchived voices. Quintana also co-directs The Five Chinatowns Project at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, a community-based research initiative documenting Chinese American Los Angeles through oral histories, archival creation, and youth mentorship.  She is the author of Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Gavin Healy, "A Guide to Mao’s China: Showing the Nation to Foreign Guests" (Cornell UP, 2026) 11.09.2026 1ชม. 2นาที

  A Guide to Mao’s China: Showing the Nation to Foreign Guests (Cornell UP, 2026) by Gavin Healy explores how tourism was reshaped during the Mao era. It follows the transformation of once-private travel agencies after 1949, the efforts of China's state tourism bureaucracy to reconcile welcoming foreign visitors with earning foreign currency, and the ways tourism workers reimagined service occupations such as tour guiding and waiting tables in the context of socialist ideology. By drawing on government archives, service worker manuals, and other kinds of ephemera, the book does a wonderful job of focusing on the people on the front lines of the tourism industry, showcasing the ordinary rank-and-file workers who were told to be polite and eager — but not fawn over guests — and to be prompt and attentive — but not servile. By looking at these service workers, this book showcases the important ideological work that tourism can do, both for the tourists being shown a new part of the world and for those doing the showing. A Guide to Mao’s China should appeal to readers interested in modern Chinese history, the history of tourism, Cold War international exchange, and the everyday workings of the socialist state. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Charles Lachman, "They Shall Not See the Dawn: The Manhunt for the Third Reich's Most Wanted" (Diversion Books, 2026) 11.09.2026 32นาที

  May 1945. The Reich is in ruins. Hitler is dead. Yet for the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, the real war has just begun.  They Shall Not See the Dawn: The Manhunt for the Third Reich's Most Wanted (Diversion Books, 2026) by Charles Lachman is the true historical thriller following a secret unit of American agents, drawn from every walk of life, hunting Hitler’s inner circle—the dangerous henchmen still at large and feared to be carrying their Führer’s final political testament, orders for a guerilla resistance, and plans for rocket and nuclear programs hidden in mountain strongholds. It was a race against time to capture World War II’s most notorious Nazis before they could vanish or rally a new resistance.  The CIC men leading the greatest manhunt in history were scholars, motivated college students, an actor, linguists, young draftees and refugees—men like Henry Kissinger—armed not just with guns, but with intellect, intuition, and sheer daring. Their quarry included Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the monstrous Gestapo chief; Julius Streicher, Hitler’s notorious “Jew-baiter”; Robert Ley, master of slave labor; and other high-ranking war criminals desperate to escape justice. Against all odds, the CIC brought them down, ensuring their places in the dock at Nuremberg.   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. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Patrick Griffin, "The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World" (Yale UP, 2023) 10.09.2026 59นาที

  David Gellman interviews Patrick Griffin on The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World The Age of Atlantic Revolution was a defining moment in western history. Our understanding of rights, of what makes the individual an individual, of how to define a citizen versus a subject, of what states should or should not do, of how labor, politics, and trade would be organized, of the relationship between the church and the state, and of our attachment to the nation all derive from this period (c. 1750–1850).Historian Patrick Griffin shows that the Age of Atlantic Revolution was rooted in how people in an interconnected world struggled through violence, liberation, and war to reimagine themselves and sovereignty. Tying together the revolutions, crises, and conflicts that undid British North America, transformed France, created Haiti, overturned Latin America, challenged Britain and Europe, vexed Ireland, and marginalized West Africa, Griffin tells a transnational tale of how empires became nations and how our world came into being. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Ashish Koul, "Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India" (Stanford UP, 2026) 09.09.2026 1ชม. 27นาที

  Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India (Stanford UP, 2026) reveals that caste, usually assumed to be a feature of Hindu society, was in fact a trans-religious phenomenon in colonial India, as it is today. Even in an Islamic religious milieu that was supposedly more egalitarian than hierarchical Hinduism, colonial Indian subjects thought and acted in terms of caste. Through a focus on one agrarian Muslim caste known as Arains, Ashish Koul shows how some Indian Muslims transmuted caste and emplaced it within their understanding of Islam. During this time, Arain Muslims were derogatively called mali— gardener—instead of what they wished to be seen as—respectable landholders. Seeking to refute such negative portrayals, a group of elite Arains came together to develop a new Islamic vocabulary for caste. Using primary sources in English and Urdu, Koul analyzes the intricacies of caste, religion, and politics among Muslims in colonial India. By asserting that being Arain was a way of being a true Muslim, elite Arains were able to intervene in significant debates about Muslim identity, colonial law, and political representation. Reinventing Caste shows that in order to understand why caste persists among South Asians, we must examine how caste consciousness has been entrenched within multiple religious traditions. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Claudia Verhoeven, "Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders" (Verso, 2026) 08.09.2026 1ชม. 5นาที

  Love and Terror, The Helter Skelter History of the Manson Murders (Verso, 2026) is the most recent addition to the hundreds of books and films devoted to the killings committed by Charlie Manson’s followers in Los Angeles in August 1969. What is different about this work is that the author Claudia Verhoeven is an intellectual historian whose previous book was on a Russian terrorist who tried to assassinate Tsar Alexander II in 1866. Verhoerven unpacks the various frames through which the participants, the trial lawyers, and the public at large interpreted the seemingly senseless violence. Manson was a charismatic ex-con whose lived on a ranch near LA with several dozen devoted followers, mostly teenage girls. After a drug deal gone wrong Manson arranged a series of grisly murders. The prosecution argued this was part of a crazy scheme, inspired by the Bible and the Beatles’ White Album, to start an apocalyptic race war. Skeptics argue Manson was just trying to cover up the drug murders. Verhoeven, an associate professor of history at Cornell, taught a class where she used the Manson case to train her students how to conduct historical research and how to think about history. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026) 07.09.2026 40นาที

  From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India. The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways. Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026)illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Sara McDougall, "Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor" (Princeton UP, 2026) 07.09.2026 1ชม. 14นาที

  In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbors about an alleged sexual assault—and about the victim’s history and place in the community. At the center of Jaques’s inquiry was a woman named Jehanne, who took the unusual step of making a criminal complaint in an age when victims of sexual violence did so at their own peril. Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor (Princeton UP, 2026) follows Jaques’s investigation as he uncovers one woman’s story of resilience and survival. Applying forensic analysis to witness testimony and Jaques’s case files, Sara McDougall finds in Jehanne a woman of many lives and many secrets. An outsider on her own in Dijon, Jehanne had every reason to distrust the local authorities, who regularly extorted money from the city’s most vulnerable residents. Separating facts from falsehoods, McDougall challenges preconceptions about the experiences of marginalized women in medieval France, showing how neighbors, clergy, and other residents aided Jehanne throughout her legal struggles—and how justice of a sort was exacted from her attackers.Richly detailed and powerfully told, Justice for Jehanne paints an unforgettable portrait of a woman who mounted an extraordinary response to a crime that was so difficult to prosecute at the time, and of a community that gave her shelter, protection, and acceptance as she endeavored to survive on her own terms. Sara McDougall is professor of history at John Jay College of the City University of New York and is on the faculty in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 and Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Her fellowships include the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Holly N. S. White, "Constructing American Childhood: Age-Based Laws and the Illusion of Protection in the Early United States" (U Virginia Press, 2026) 03.09.2026 37นาที

  Edward Blum interviews Holly White on her new book Constructing American Childhood: Age-Based Laws and the Illusion of Protection in the Early United States. As of 2025, in the United States an eleven-year-old child can be charged with a federal crime while in many states it’s illegal to leave a twelve-year-old home alone. Twenty-six states allow children younger than sixteen to marry while the legal drinking age remains twenty-one. Are these age-based laws really protecting children, and if not, why do they exist? Holly White uncovers the answers to these questions through a history of America’s first age-based laws. Analyzing trial records, newspapers, personal letters and diaries, as well as legal statutes from the founding era to the Civil War, White shows how restrictive age-based laws were implemented to benefit those who already held power. Over time, these new laws—coming out of child murder and rape trials as well as guardianship and underage marriage disputes—increasingly circumscribed the rights of young Americans in the early republic. As White shows, race, class, status, and gender influenced who came to benefit from the label of “child” in post-revolutionary America. In so doing, Constructing American Childhood explains why Americans continue to be guided by the age-based legal definitions of childhood and adulthood of our past. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Marnie Hughes-Warrington, "Artificial Historians" (Routledge, 2025) 03.09.2026 1ชม. 2นาที

  I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic leader, and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) based at the University of Adelaide, my guest explores how the logic of history, defined around trivalent logic (the “maybes,” the “ifs,” the ontological uncertainties), intersects with and challenges the logic of dominant AI algorithms. The book raises urgent questions about the changing status of human agency, the ethics of AI-powered data collection about us, and the de facto histories that AI is writing about us every second—histories that may decide whether we can travel, access education, or receive medical care. We talk about the opportunities that this perspective on AI presents to humans (and historians in particular!), how some non-Western conceptions of history—for instance, those of the Indigenous nations of Australia—complicate the dominant Western understanding of what history is, and the challenges we must address as we hand over more and more data and delegate the writing of actual human histories to AI. Aristotle makes a cameo, and my guest talks about how the economy might be shifting from knowledge bias to ethics bias. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Nancy Yunhwa Rao, "Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth Century California and Beyond" (U Illinois Press, 2025) 02.09.2026 59นาที

  The first large number of Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in the 1840s, and Chinese opera troupes were not far behind. In Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth Century California and Beyond (U Illinois Press, 2025), Nancy Yunhwa Rao writes the story of the flourishing and resiliency of Chinese opera in America. Chinese opera troupes brought with them an important cultural reminder of China that helped immigrants to build community and maintain connections with their old home in their new one. At the same time, anti-Chinese violence, legislation, and prejudice was a constant and growing threat to Chinese immigrants and Chinese theater. As Chinese theater became part of California and San Francisco culture, popular Chinese actors advocated for their art alongside appeals for civil rights. Rao draws on personal accounts and artifacts to place theater within the everyday lives of Chinese people. She also describes the costumes, singing, staging, and storytelling that impacted mainstream reception and influenced how Chinese communities saw themselves. Rao makes a convincing argument that more attention to the transpacific connections between the US and Asia is vital to telling the true story of America. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Xiaochang Li, "Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2026) 02.09.2026 40นาที

  Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI.  With original research and clear explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human speech, she demonstrates how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting instead for work-arounds that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Dr. Li reveals, transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access, circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and ever-growing amounts of new data. At its core, Divination Engines illuminates how the artifacts of human communication—speech, text, and images—have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic culture. 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.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Eran A. Zelnik, "American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man's Democracy, 1750–1850" (JHU Press, 2025) 01.09.2026 59นาที

  A joke is never just a joke—not even in the eighteenth century. In American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man's Democracy, 1750–1850 (JHU Press, 2025) Eran A. Zelnik offers a cultural history of early America that shows how humor among white men served to define and construct not only whiteness and masculinity but also American political culture and democracy more generally. Zelnik traces the emerging bonds of affinity that white male settlers in North America cultivated through their shared, transformative experience of mirth. This humor—a category that includes not only jokes but also play, riot, revelry, and mimicry—shaped the democratic and anti-elitist sensibilities of Americans. It also defined the borders of who could participate in politics, notably excluding those who were not white men. While this anti-authoritarian humor transformed the early United States into a country that abhorred elitism and class hierarchies, ultimately the story is one of democratization gone awry: this same humor allowed white men to draw the borders of the new nation exclusively around themselves. Zelnik analyzes several distinct forms of humor to make his case: tall tales, "Indian play," Black dialect, riot and revelry, revolutionary protests, and blackface minstrelsy. This provocative study seeks to understand the vexing, contradictory interplay among humor, democracy, and violence at the heart of American history and culture that continues today. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Edward Cutler, "This Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation" (Chelsea Green, 2026) 01.09.2026 55นาที

  In This Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation (Chelsea Green, 2026), discover Italy’s unique ecological past and how it has shaped its present—and its future, with this riveting look at the incredibly diverse natural history and our need to preserve it. Italy is renowned for its antiquity, classical literature, philosophy, and modern-day culture, cuisine and fashion, but what has gone largely overlooked – and undocumented, even by its people – is its uniquely biodiverse landscape and wildlife. Italy has over 58,000 different species of wildlife, of which 4,777 are endemic, the highest in Europe. Italy provides a home for a third of all European flora and fauna, with a vast range of fruit and vegetable varieties: more grape varieties than France, more wheat than the US and more olives than Spain.  Edward Cutler, an art historian by trade, began to explore this history when, four years ago on his small Tuscan farm, he found a salamander that turned out to be endemic to that specific location. In understanding how Italy came together as a country, one of the youngest and still geologically active landscapes in the world, and made up of mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, glacial lakes, desert islands, caves and forests, Ed realised that this natural history has also had an incredibly important influence on its human history, especially its food culture and low-impact agriculture. And along the way, Ed discovers that Italy once was home to pygmy elephants, giant killer hedgehogs, and vampire-toothed deer. Today we can see the relics of those ancient creatures in the flashy blue lizard of Capri, gladiator crabs under the forum in Rome, the crested porcupine, the beautiful Apennine chamois and of course the Marzipan brown bear and Italian grey wolf, not forgetting its flora, including the world’s rarest Christmas tree in Sicily. 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. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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  Raf de Bont et al eds., "Globalizing Wildlife" (UNC Press, 2026) 31.08.2026 48นาที

  Humans have always incorporated wildlife into processes of work, capture, and exchange. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, globalization became the latest in a long line of forces affecting human-animal relations. Grey parrots travelled the world as pets; rats used global shipping infrastructure to spread to far-off islands and became the object of cross-border extermination campaigns; and California sea otters were relocated to accommodate global oil transportation needs. The language of globalization, however, is rarely used to understand the history of these creatures. Globalizing Wildlife (UNC Press, 2026) shows how wild animals were not simply affected by globalization but shaped its concrete trajectories at local, national, and international scales. The editors and contributors of this collection bring the more-than-human turn to globalization studies, foregrounding not only how globalization matters for wildlife but also how wildlife matters for and constitutes globalization. The volume presents a range of geographically- and species-diverse case studies spanning from the 1870s to the present day to show that globalizing wildlife is far from a homogenous process. Ultimately, contributors reconceptualize globalization and wildlife in relation to one another and foster new connections between the longstanding study of globalization and the dynamic, rapidly consolidating field of historical animal studies. Contributors are Vincent Bijman, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Regina Horta Duarte, George Iordachescu, Nancy J. Jacobs, Ajit Menon, Gregg Mitman, Nitin D. Rai, Simone Schleper, Jules Skotnes-Brown, Monica Vasile, and James L. A. Webb Jr. Jacob Ward is an historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written on the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he’s currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history