A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann * on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academic readership, and now The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial ...
Nov 26, 2019•59 min•Ep. 71
What happened when Americans and Soviets fought alongside one another against Hitler? How did relations at Poltava airbase reveal cracks in the Grand Alliance? Serhii Plokhy tells the story of personal relationships and high geopolitics in his new book Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance (Oxford University Press, 2019). Using a wealth of memoirs and recently declassified secret police files, Plokhy captures the i...
Nov 20, 2019•58 min•Ep. 655
Today I talked to S. Deborah Kang about her book The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-195 4 , published by Oxford University Press in 2017. The INS on the Line explores the history behind Immigration and Naturalization Service throughout the 20th Century, interrogating how this agency was critical to the creation and re-creation of immigration law during this time period. Kang shows that the INS did not just think of itself as a law enforcement agency, but th...
Nov 11, 2019•50 min•Ep. 649
In the United States in particular, there is almost no social space today, whether that’s Thanksgiving dinner or going shopping, that has not become saturated with political meaning. In Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place (Oxford University Press, 2019), Robert Talisse argues that contrary to what many democratic theorists have argued, democracy is something we can do too much of – and that it is in fact being overdone. Talisse, who is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosoph...
Nov 11, 2019•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 200
Carlton F. W. Larson is the author of The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2019). The Trials of Allegiance looks at the law of treason during the American Revolution, showing just how central treason is to understanding the course of the Revolution. Looking at Pennsylvania, Professor Larson provides readers with a comprehensive study of treason prosecutions brought by Americans against non-Patriots or non-Rebels, depending on who you as...
Nov 06, 2019•41 min•Ep. 640
Jonathan Rosa 's new book Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the emergence of linguistic and ethnoracial categories in the context of Latinidad. The book draws from more than twenty-four months of ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork in a Chicago public school, whose student body is more than 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican, to analyze the racialization of language and its relationshi...
Nov 04, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 61
According to an intuitive view, lives are meaningful when they manifest a directedness or instantiate a project such that the disparate events and endeavors “add up to” a life. John Stuart Mill’s life certainly was devoted to a project in that sense. Yet Mill’s life was in many respects unsatisfying – riven with anxiety and trauma. What does Mill’s life teach us about meaningful lives? In John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press 2019), Elijah Millgram weaves intellectual...
Nov 01, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 203
Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Before WWII, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women's labors. Over time, the ILO embraced non-discrimination and equal treatment. It now promotes fair glob...
Nov 01, 2019•44 min•Ep. 28
Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, aft...
Oct 30, 2019•44 min•Ep. 182
In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford Univiersity Press, 2019), the eminent foreign policy scholar Michael Mandelbaum examines that remarkable quarter century, describing how and why the peace was established and then fell apart. To be sure, wars took place in this era, but less frequently and on a far smaller scale than in previous periods. Mandelbaum argues that the widespread peace ended because thre...
Oct 24, 2019•55 min•Ep. 635
In Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War (Oxford UP, 2019), Julia G. Young reframes the Cristero war as a transnational conflict, using previously unexamined archival materials from both Mexico and the United States to investigate the intersections between Mexico's Cristero War and Mexican migration to the United States during the late 1920s. She traces the formation, actions, and ideologies of the Cristero diaspora--a network of Mexicans across the United States wh...
Oct 23, 2019•52 min•Ep. 61
What’s the first image that comes to mind when you hear the words “Paris” and “photography”? Is it a famous photo, perhaps an Atget, Brassai, or Doisneau? In her new book, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860-1970 (Oxford UP, 2018), Catherine Clark explores the history of how and why photographic images have been central to understanding and imagining the city’s present and past, figuring profoundly in the representation and documentation of change over time in the Fren...
Oct 18, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 69
How did a Danish historian wind up with a human skull from colonial India in his University of London office? Kim A. Wagner ’s The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (Oxford University Press, 2018) tells two stories. The first concerns the way in which he came into possession of the skull of a Muslim soldier executed by the British in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1857, also known as the Mutiny. The second story is Wagner’s attempted biography of Alum Bheg, a man who l...
Oct 07, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 623
The political protests of the “Red Shirts” movement in Thailand in April-May 2010 ended in tragedy, with the security forces killing over 90 people and injuring thousands more. Thailand’s political protests have been studied from many different angles, but perhaps the most unusual approach to this subject is to be found in Benjamin Tausig ’s book, Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, & Constraint (Oxford University Press, 2019) . This book examines the protests and the associated violence fro...
Sep 30, 2019•41 min•Ep. 55
Robert Alexander ’s new book, Representation and the Electoral College (Oxford UP, 2019) is an important analysis of the Electoral College, from the debates about it at the constitutional convention and during the early days of the republic to contemporary controversies that surround this unique construction. Alexander frames the book with the theoretical conundrum of representation, unpacking different kinds of representation and how these competing interpretations of representation have contri...
Sep 25, 2019•51 min•Ep. 373
In Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2019), Charlie Laderman exposes the way that imperial ambitions suffused the ideas and practices of turn-of-century humanitarian intervention. Beginning his story in the late 19th century Ottoman Empire, Dr. Laderman demonstrates how the successive waves of violence perpetrated against Armenian Christians provoked new ways of thinking about imperial govern...
Sep 18, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 597
Sara Georgini is a historian and series editor for The Papers of John Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a family biography that explores the Christian republicanism of John and Abigail Adams and how it shaped their view of the origins and destiny of the American nation under the guidance of divine providence. The book charts change in religious culture through the generations with profiles of ...
Sep 18, 2019•55 min•Ep. 143
Mahalia Jackson, the great mid-twentieth century gospel singer, thought of herself as an embodiment of the history of African Americans in the United States. She understood that her family’s background, as they moved from enslavement in Louisiana to farming in the same rural area to New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century and then her own move to Chicago with the Great Migration was emblematic of the experiences of generations of black people. In Mahalia Jackson & the Black Gos...
Sep 17, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 88
The story of the creation of the Book of Mormon has been told many times, and often ridiculed. A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon (Oxford University Press, 2019), by Larry E. Morris , presents and examines the primary sources surrounding the origin of the foundational text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the most successful new religion of modern times. The scores of documents transcribed and annotated in this book include family histories, journal entries, letters, ...
Sep 17, 2019•51 min•Ep. 130
As the wife of a Macedonian king and the mother of three sons who would succeed him, Eurydice played an important role in Macedonia at an important moment in the kingdom’s history. In Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power (Oxford University Press, 2019), Elizabeth Donnelly Carney draws upon recent archaeological findings and other sources to reconstruct her role as queen and queen mother during this time. As Carney notes, many of the surviving materials of Eurydice conflict in their portray...
Sep 12, 2019•57 min•Ep. 153
In Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2018), Aaron Hale-Dorrell re-evaluates Khrushchev’s corn campaign as the cornerstone of his reformation programs. Corn was key to Khrushchev’s promises of providing everyone with the abundance required for achieving communism, which included the introduction of a varied diet rich in meat and dairy (which would be corn fed) following decades of austerity during collectivization and WWII. Khr...
Sep 11, 2019•1 hr 18 min
Amanda L. Tyler is the author of Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay , published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Habeas Corpus in Wartime is a comprehensive history of the writ of habeas corpus in Anglo-America. From its early beginnings, to the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, to its suspension during the American Civil War, to WWII internment camps, to the War on Terror, Tyler provides a compelling look at how important the writ has been during wartime. A...
Sep 09, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 594
It is common to see science and religion portrayed as mutually exclusive and warring ways of viewing the world, but is that how actual scientists see it? For that matter, which cultural factors shape the attitudes of scientists toward religion? Could scientists help show us a way to build collaboration between scientific and religious communities, if such collaborations are even possible? The book we’re looking at today, Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About...
Sep 05, 2019•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 38
Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019) looks at the legion of children and teenagers who sold newspapers on city streets, moving trains, and even Civil War battlefields in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Author Vincent DiGirolamo , a history professor at Baruch College, is featured in this New Books Network/ Gotham Center for New York City History podcast interview with Beth Harpaz, editor of the City University of New York website SUM . A major theme...
Sep 04, 2019•30 min•Ep. 590
The king’s guards became increasingly nervous as they watched nearly 7,000 individuals march on Versailles on October 5, 1789. The crowd approaching the king’s chateau was overwhelmingly composed of women who were determined to make their grievances known. Furious at the ever rising price and scarcity of bread, Parisian market women, known as Dames des Halles, joined with other revolutionaries to demand King Louis XVI distribute bread, address the suffering of his subjects, and approve revolutio...
Sep 04, 2019•51 min•Ep. 584
Amy Olberding ’s The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2019) is a joy to read, both entertaining and rich in ideas. The Wrong of Rudeness asks a key question for our times how do we interact with each other, especially in politically contentious situations? Olberding addresses this and related issues by bringing our moderns challenges into dialogue with thinkers from early China. Weaving together modern cultural references with innovative rea...
Sep 03, 2019•56 min•Ep. 291
Bianca Premo ’s award-winning book The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire , published by Oxford University Press in 2017, makes a powerful yet seemingly simple claim: during the eighteenth century, illiterate ordinary litigants in colonial Spanish America created enlightened ideas and practices by suing their social superiors in higher numbers and with novel claims. By focusing on civil suits undertaken by women, indigenous groups, and the enslaved, ...
Sep 02, 2019•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 58
Just in time for the APSA annual meeting, Niambi Michele Carter has written an incredibly timely book on a central issue to American politics, American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2019). Carter is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University. Her work focuses on racial and ethnic politics in the United States, specifically public opinion and political behavior of African Americans. In American While Black ,...
Aug 28, 2019•34 min•Ep. 369
On October 14, 1998, five thousand people gathered on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to mourn the death of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who had been murdered in Wyoming eight days earlier. Politicians and celebrities addressed the crowd and the televised national audience to share their grief with the country. Never before had a gay citizen's murder elicited such widespread outrage or concern from straight Americans. In Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American ...
Aug 27, 2019•45 min•Ep. 581
In his new book, Envisioning A Tibetan Luminary: The Life of a Modern Bonpo Saint (Oxford University Press, 2018), William M. Gorvine provides a multifaceted analysis of Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen (1859-1934), one of the most prominent modern representatives of the Tibetan Bön tradition. Engaging two written versions of Shardza’s life story as well as oral histories gathered during fieldwork in eastern Tibet and Bön exile communities in India, Gorvine explores the ways in which Shardza has been repr...
Aug 26, 2019•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 56
