The social practice we call science has had spectacular success in explaining the natural world since the 17th century. While advanced mathematics and other precursors of modern science were not unique to Europe, it was there that Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and others came up with theories that got modern physics and chemistry off the ground. In his latest book, Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science (Oxford University Press, 2016), J.D. Trout mounts a spirited defense of the...
Oct 15, 2016•1 hr 8 min
Eric Gardner’s new study Black Print Unbound: the Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015) explores the development and voice of the Christian Recorder during the years leading up to and immediately after the American Civil War. As the house organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Recorder held a national reach among free African Americans and became an integral part of broader nineteenth-century black print networks. Th...
Oct 07, 2016•1 hr 3 min
The words “Buddhism” and “enlightenment” are, at least in the West, tightly connected. “Everyone” knows that the goal–or at least one of the goals–of Buddhist practice is “enlightenment.” But what the heck is “enlightenment,” exactly? It’s a tough question, but Dale S. Wright takes it on in his aptly named book What is Buddhist Enlightenment? (Oxford University Press, 2016). Using a kind of Zen approach (my characterization, not his), Wright doesn’t slice and dice the concept in order to come up...
Oct 04, 2016•1 hr 1 min
With the 2016 presidential election in full swing and rhetoric surrounding each candidate becoming more polarized, how does gender impact the way that people behave politically? Monika McDermott in her new book Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2016) seeks to answer this question. In her analysis, McDermott argues that gendered personalities are a powerful determinant of political behavior and involvement. The campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Dona...
Sep 30, 2016•1 hr 2 min
In Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), Harini Nagendra traces centuries of interaction between ecology and urban change, revealing not only the destructive tendencies of urbanization, but also the remarkable ways in which nature survives in one of India’s largest cities. From the ecology of slum life and propensity for home gardens to the differing conceptions of parks and uses of trees, the book brings together the various ways in whic...
Sep 26, 2016•40 min
Today is the third of our occasional series on the question of how to respond to mass atrocities. Earlier this summer I talked with Scott Straus and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Later in September I’ll talk with Carrie Booth Walling. I’m teaching a class on the Historical Method this semester. As part of this we’ve talked quite a bit about the question of whether historians have ethical imperatives as part of their writing. As you might expect, the students have disagreed, sometimes emotionally, about...
Sep 21, 2016•1 hr 5 min
Our modern networked world owes an oftentimes unacknowledged debt to Guglielmo Marconi. As Marc Raboy demonstrates in Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), it was he who pioneered the concept of wireless global communications. As a teenager he was fascinated by the recent discovery of radio waves, and by the time he was in his early twenties he had developed an apparatus that used these waves to transmit and receive messages. Traveling to London, he demonstrat...
Sep 21, 2016•1 hr 5 min
A decade and a half of exhausting wars, punishing economic setbacks, and fast-rising rivals has called into question America’s fundamental position and purpose in world politics. Will the US continue to be the only superpower in the international system? Should it continue advancing the world-shaping grand strategy it has followed since the dawn of the Cold War? Or should it “come home” and focus on its internal problems? The recent resurgence of isolationist impulses has made the politics surro...
Sep 16, 2016•1 hr 5 min
With the recent economic collapse and rising income inequality, lessons drawn from turn-of-the century capitalism have become frequent. Pundits, policymakers, and others have looked to the era to find precursors to an unregulated market, corrupt bankers, and severe economic inequality. The comparisons are often too simple, however. In their new book, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (Oxford University Press, 2015), Barbara Hahn and Bruce...
Sep 16, 2016•55 min
In the genes vs. environment debate, it is widely accepted that what we do, who we are, and what mental illnesses we are at risk for result from a complex combination of both factors. Just how complex is revealed in Behaving: What’s Genetic, What’s Not, and Why Should We Care? (Oxford University Press, 2016), Kenneth Schaffner’s assessment of the impact of recent biological research on the genetic contribution to behavior. Among the developments he considers are the sequencing of the human genom...
Sep 15, 2016•1 hr 5 min
During the 18th century English country houses served an important function in their society as stages for the display of the status and power of the landed aristocracy. As Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery demonstrate in Consumption and the Country House (Oxford University Press, 2016), though, they also played a revealing role as centers of consumption. Using three aristocratic families from the Midlands as case studies, Stobart and Rothery survey their patterns of spending over several generations...
Sep 11, 2016•56 min
In 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers, Crimea seems as remote today as it was when colonized by the ancient Greeks. Neil Kent’s (University of Cambridge) Crimea: A History (Hurst & Company, 2016) recounts the history of the Crimea over three millennia. A crossroads between Europe and Asia, ships sailed to a...
Sep 02, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Anger is among the most familiar phenomena in our moral lives. It is common to think that anger is an appropriate, and sometimes morally required, emotional response to wrongdoing and injustice. In fact, our day-to-day lives are saturated with inducements not only to become angry, but to embrace the idea that anger is morally righteous. However, at the same time, were all familiar with the ways in which anger can go morally wrong. We know that anger can eat away at us; it can render us morally b...
Sep 01, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Daniel Kreiss is back on the podcast with his new book Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Kreiss is associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Why did it take more than 20 people to write a tweet for the Romney campaign? Why did dozens of new companies emerge from recent Democ...
Aug 29, 2016•32 min
In The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2015), Roberta Rosenthal Kwall , the Raymond P. Niro Professor of Intellectual Property Law at DePaul University College of Law, applies a cultural analysis framework to Jewish law, to show that Jewish culture has a grounding in Jewish law. The evolution of Jewish law is guided and shaped by human elements and shifting power dynamics. Kwall argues that both law and culture are necessary for forging mea...
Aug 29, 2016•29 min
D. Asher Ghertner explores why the ways things look are fundamental for Delhi’s transformation into a “world class”city. Based on deep ethnographic engagement in one of the city’s slums that is destined to be demolished, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) weaves the experiences of these slum dwellers together with an analysis of middle class Resident Welfare Associations, legal rulings, influential reports, and idle chatter to argue that mapping ...
Aug 11, 2016•54 min
According to the blurb, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics (Oxford University Press, 2016) “explores the ways in which linguistic diversity mediates social justice in liberal democracies.” This is true, but tends to understate the force of the arguments being put forward here. Ingrid Piller presents a powerful case for how language is variously overlooked or misunderstood as a factor that entrenches disadvantage and inequality in a globalized soc...
Aug 03, 2016•57 min
Russell Rickford is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University. We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power and the Radical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an intellectual history of the Pan African nationalist schools that emerged in the late 1960s from dissatisfaction with urban school desegregation and its failure to provide an equal education and foster racial pride. Influenced by Third World theories and African anti-colonial campaigns, these...
Jul 31, 2016•54 min
The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb , Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014) by presenting the fullest and mos...
Jul 25, 2016•48 min
Seth Masket has written The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How they Weaken Democracy (Oxford UP, 2016). Masket is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Denver. In a political season filled with candidate promises to challenge established party players, most have been focused squarely on national politics. The Inevitable Party shifts attention back to the states. Masket shows that state experiments with democratic ref...
Jul 18, 2016•20 min
Cassandra A. Good is the Associate Editor of the Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington. Her book Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a historical examination of the cross-gender friendships that formed against great social odds and popular opinion that held that these relationships were highly irregular and impossible to maintain chaste. Beginning with the relationships of Abigail Adam...
Jul 13, 2016•51 min
Noriko Manabe’s new book is a compelling analysis of the content, performance style, and role of music in social movements in contemporary Japan. Paying special attention to the constraints that limit and censor people–both ordinary citizens and musicians–from speaking out on sensitive political issues, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima (Oxford University Press, 2015) focuses on the music of post-Fukushima antinuclear protests. Manabe looks carefully at the role...
Jul 09, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Thanks to the writings of Procopius and other detractors, the Byzantine empress Theodora (c. 495-548 CE) has long been viewed as a depraved and spiteful woman who was a negative influence on her husband Justinian. In his new book Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint (Oxford University Press, 2015), historian David Potter draws upon a wide range of sources to offer a very different view of her life and times. From relatively humble beginnings she became a successful actress and the mistress of a pow...
Jun 26, 2016•56 min
In Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015), John Alba Cutler provides a literary history of Chicano/a literature that tracks the fields formation and evolution from the 1960s forward. The central focus of the book examines the tension between the theories posited by scholars of assimilation sociology and Chicano/a writers whose literary works, focusing on the Mexican American experience, have advanced rival interpretations of the process of assim...
Jun 26, 2016•1 hr 3 min
On this program, I spoke with Joseph Lam about his book, Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept (Oxford University Press, 2016). Joseph Lam is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago. His articles have appeared in Vetus Testamentum and the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religio...
Jun 26, 2016•1 hr 2 min
How does one “rethink and revise the key concepts of Hannah Arendt’s political theory in light of the struggles of asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants” (207)? In her new book Rightlessness in An Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants (Oxford University Press, 2015), Ayten Gundogdu (Political Science, Barnard College) engages this question to explore both a radical critique and radical rethinking of human rights in our age. The book challenges an...
Jun 26, 2016•1 hr 9 min
Is it possible to lay claim to ownership of a dance? Is choreography intellectual property? How have shifting conceptions of race and gender shaped the way we think of dance, property and ownership? In Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance , Anthea Kraut wrestles mightily with these questions as she presents the first book by a dance scholar to focus explicitly on matters of copyright and choreography. Combining archival research with critical ...
Jun 23, 2016•36 min
Few composers dominate a genre of music as completely as did Scott Joplin. From the publication of his iconic Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 onward his ragtime compositions came to serve as the soundtrack of his age. Yet Joplin aspired to be recognized not just as a successful writer of popular tunes but as a respected composer of classical music, an ambition that led him to write a ballet and two operas. In a new edition of his biography of Scott Joplin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era , the ...
Jun 15, 2016•1 hr
Michael F. Robinson ‘s new book is such a pleasure to read, I cant even. It’s not just because you get to say Gambaragara over and over again if you read it aloud. (I recommend doing this, even if just with that one word.) It’s not just because its a beautifully crafted work of prose. And it’s not just because its quite literally a page-turner. The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016) is also a masterful biography of an ...
Jun 03, 2016•1 hr 9 min
Moral life is infused with emotionally-charged interactions. When a stranger carelessly steps on my foot, I not only feel pain in my foot, I also am affronted by her carelessness. Whereas the former may cause me to wince, the latter arouses resentment, which can be communicated with an emotionally-toned protest, Um. . . excuse me. . . With this a protest, I hold the stranger responsible for her act. Yet there are cases where the stranger who steps on my foot does not manifest an objectionable ca...
Jun 01, 2016•1 hr 9 min
