George Fisher, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, just released his new book Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America’s Drug War , with Oxford University Press. George has been teaching and writing in the realms of evidence, prosecution practice, and criminal legal history since 1995. He began practice as a prosecutor in Massachusetts and later taught at the law schools of Boston College, Harvard, and Yale. Beware Euphoria is the most recent among a...
Jan 24, 2026•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 60
The world is encountering multiple crises - climate, droughts, floods, energy, food, and pandemics, to name a few. Capitalism and Crises: How to Fix Them (Oxford UP, 2024) is about how capitalism can help fix them It has helped to cause because of a misconception about the nature of the system. There has been a failure to understand the key institution business. This book describes why this has happened and what needs to change to address it. At the core of the problem is the key driver of capit...
Jan 22, 2026•1 hr 18 min
Stephen C. Foster (1826–1864) was a prolific song composer. A few of his minstrel tunes have become so enmeshed in American musical culture that they are often thought to be folk songs. Although he died in poverty and most of his music was quickly forgotten, by the early twentieth century he was hailed as the “Father of American Music” and had become a symbol of US democracy. In Formulating Foster: Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth (Oxford University Press, 2025), Chr...
Jan 19, 2026•1 hr 2 min
Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Duncan Kelly is a new intellectual history of the many and varied ideas about politics and economics that were made, and remade, through wartime and revolution, by political and economic thinkers working across the globe, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Spanning continents, connecting networks of people, power, and possibilities, in new and often experimental ways, the worlds of warti...
Jan 19, 2026•1 hr 26 min
Broadway has body issues. What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body. In Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity (Oxford UP, 2023), author Ryan Donovan explores how ability, sexuality, and size intersect ...
Jan 18, 2026•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 115
Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Elizabeth Kelly Gray's book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914 (Oxford UP, 2023) traces the history of unregulated drug use and dependency before 1914, when the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act limited sales of opiates and cocaine under US law. Many Americans used opiates and other drugs medically and became addicted. Some tried ‘Hasheesh Candy’, injected morphine, or visited opium dens, but neither use nor...
Jan 18, 2026•59 min•Ep. 189
From a scrawny, overlooked military graduate to the youngest general in Europe, Francisco Franco was known for his ambition, talent and calculated risk-taking. Yet his reputation remains a topic of fierce debate. Did he destroy Spain and stifle its democracy or rescue the nation from left-wing tumult? In this compelling biography, Giles Tremlett unravels the complex life and legacy of the enigmatic dictator who shaped twentieth-century Spanish history. El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco F...
Jan 17, 2026•59 min
Sara Swenson is Assistant Professor of Religion and Affiliated Faculty in Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages at Dartmouth College. Her areas of expertise include Religions of Southeast Asia, Buddhism in Vietnam, Gender and Sexuality, Affect Theory, and Ethnography. She received her Ph.D. in Religion from Syracuse University in 2021. She also holds an M.Phil. in Religion and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Women's and Gender Studies from Syracuse University, an M.A. in Comparative Religi...
Jan 15, 2026•1 hr 4 min
In Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Jose Eos Trinidad reveals how organizations outside schools have created an invisible infrastructure not only to affect local school districts but also to shape US education. He illustrates this by providing a behind-the-scenes look at how local organizations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City have transformed data and worked with high schools to address the problem of students dropping out. The book argues th...
Jan 15, 2026•54 min
Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (Oxford UP, 2025) offers a fresh account of evangelical power by uncovering how the American Tract Society (ATS) leveraged print media to spread its message across an expanding nation. One of the era's largest media corporations and a pillar of the benevolent empire, the ATS circulated some 5.6 billion printed pages between its founding in 1825 and the eve of the Civil War. It wasn't just the volume of materials that mattered—it was the ...
Jan 14, 2026•47 min
All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, much less one exclusive to humans. Instead, it defines agency as an umbrella term for the concrete sociomaterial processes that emerge from the collaborative efforts of multiple entities acting together. Agency isn't the faculty of an individual entity or self; it's always the function of a network or assembly of actors. Second, many of the actors i...
Jan 13, 2026•56 min
An eye-opening look at how all American workers, even the highly educated and experienced, are vulnerable to the stigma of unemployment. After receiving a PhD in mathematics from MIT, Larry spent three decades working at prestigious companies in the tech industry. Initially he was not worried when he lost his job as part of a large layoff, but the prolonged unemployment that followed decimated his finances and nearly ended his marriage. Larry's story is not an anomaly. The majority of American w...
Jan 12, 2026•34 min•Ep. 172
In the oceans of ink devoted to the monumental movie star/businesswoman/political activist Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (1932-2011), her beauty and not-so-private life frequently overshadowed her movies. While she knew how to generate publicity like no other, her personal life is set aside in this volume in favor of her professional oeuvre and unique screen dynamism. In On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide (Oxford UP, 2024), her marriages, illnesses, media firestorms, perfume empire, violet ey...
Jan 11, 2026•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 184
Persian Paradigms in Early Modern English Drama examines the concept of early modern globality and the development of European toleration discourse through English representations of Persian monarchs and Persianate conceptions of hospitality as paradigms of interreligious and intercultural hospitality for early modern and Shakespearean drama. English playwrights depict Persia and its legendary monarchs, such as Cyrus the Great, Xerxes, and Darius, as alternative figures of cosmopolitanism in the...
Jan 07, 2026•1 hr•Ep. 376
The crusade movement needed women: their money, their prayer support, their active participation, and their inspiration. Helen J. Nicholson's book Women and the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2023) surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570, when the last crusader state, Cyprus, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. It considers women's ac...
Jan 06, 2026•36 min•Ep. 68
Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone." The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past (Oxford UP, 2023) challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals...
Jan 05, 2026•44 min•Ep. 1293
How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics...
Jan 05, 2026•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 183
From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. In this comprehensive biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927-2003). Bas...
Jan 03, 2026•46 min•Ep. 14
"Today’s 'pro-Europeans' would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the attempt to link the two baffling and outrageous," writes Hans Kundnani in Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Oxford UP, 2023). Yet, he does so - taking the reader on a historical journey through the development of European identity from Christendom to the coincidence of the Enlightenment and the development of coloni...
Jan 01, 2026•48 min•Ep. 15
The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism (2024) is the first detailed and critical study of the intellectual and political connections that existed between some German scholars specializing on India, non-academic ‘India experts,’ Indian anti-colonialists and various organs of the Nazi state published by the Oxford University Press. It explores the ways in which different knowledge discourses pertaining to India, particularly its colonization and the anti-colonial movement, were used b...
Jan 01, 2026•47 min•Ep. 191
To achieve legitimate self-government in America's extended Republic, the U.S. Constitution depends on Congress harmonizing the country's factions through a process of conflict and accommodation. Why Congress (Oxford University Press, 2023) demonstrates the value of this activity by showing the legislature's distinctive contributions in two crucial moments in the mid-twentieth century: during World War II, when congressional deliberation contributed to national cohesion by balancing interests an...
Dec 31, 2025•50 min•Ep. 662
Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2023) is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Juli...
Dec 31, 2025•56 min•Ep. 79
What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved? In Critique of Political Decolonization (Oxford UP, 2023), Bernard Forjwuor challenges what, in normative scholarship, has become a persistent conflation of two different concepts: political decolonization and political independence. This scholarly volume is an antinormative and critical refutation of the decolonial accom...
Dec 31, 2025•54 min•Ep. 181
Scott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley. He teaches and writes about Buddhism in the West, Pure Land Buddhism, and Buddhist modernism. As of 2010, there were approximately 3-4 million Buddhists in the United States, and that figure is expected to grow significantly. Beyond the numbers, the influence of Buddhism can be felt throughout the culture, with many more people practicin...
Dec 30, 2025•59 min•Ep. 104
Travel to virtually any African country and you are likely to find a Coca-Cola, often a cold one at that. Bottled asks how this carbonated drink became ubiquitous across the continent, and what this reveals about the realities of globalisation, development and capitalism. Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sara Byala is the first assessment of the social, commercial and environmental impact of one of the planet's biggest brands and largest corporations, ...
Dec 30, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 174
In Sesame Street: A Transnational History (Oxford UP, 2023), author Helle Strandgaard Jensen tells the story of how the American television show became a global brand. Jensen argues that because the show's domestic production was not financially viable from the beginning, Sesame Street became a commodity that its producers assertively marketed all over the world. Sesame Street: A Transnational History combines archival research from seven countries, bolstering an insightful analysis of how local...
Dec 29, 2025•57 min•Ep. 102
Previous guest Jacob Bricca ( Documentary Editing: Principles and Practice ) is a professional film editor and director, specializing in documentaries. In his new book, he breaks down the hidden conventions of the documentary film in accessible language for film students and documentary enthusiasts alike. Chapters on Narrative and Meaning show how documentaries use story constructions borrowed from fiction filmmaking and combine elements from disparate sources in order to prosecute their stories...
Dec 28, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 168
In his influential Anti-Semite and Jew , French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed "If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him." In doing so he articulated the figure of an Antisemite responsible for imagining the Jew in a formulation that has lasted for decades. This figure became an indispensable trope in the period immediately after the war. It enabled Germans and Austrians to navigate a radically changed political and cultural landscape and reestablish lives upended by war...
Dec 28, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 705
In contemporary Indonesia the idea that Islam and Marxism are inherently incompatible has become deeply entrenched. However, as Lin Hongxuan's work Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic (Oxford University Press, 2023) shows, the relationship between them in Indonesian history is deeply intertwined. Based on a wealth of Indonesian language sources, Lin traces over the half century between 1915 and 1965 how Islam and Marxism coexisted and converged in the...
Dec 25, 2025•47 min•Ep. 173
American wars in Iraq were a defining feature of global politics for almost thirty years. The Gulf War of 1991, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the campaign against the Islamic State beginning in 2014 each had their own logic. Each occurrence was a distinct conflict; however they must not only be considered in isolation. The United States spent the 1990s trying but failing to implement the Gulf War's cease fire agreement. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American lea...
Dec 24, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 317
