"Self-Made" success is now an American badge of honor that rewards individualist ambitions while it hammers against community obligations. Yet, four centuries ago, our foundational stories actually disparaged ambitious upstarts as dangerous and selfish threats to a healthy society. In Pamela Walker Laird's fascinating history of why and how storytellers forged this American myth, she reveals how the goals for self-improvement evolved from serving the community to supporting individualist dreams ...
Jun 14, 2026•49 min
The relationship between the Church and the world has been a subject of debate since the Church's earliest days. In A Church for a Secular World: The Development of Klaas Schilder's Ecclesiology (Brill, 2025), Marinus De Jong explores how Stanley Hauerwas, with his emphasis on the Church as polis, made a significant contemporary contribution—one that has also faced strong criticism. This study examines the distinctive insights of second-generation neo-Calvinist theologian Klaas Schilder (1890-19...
Jun 14, 2026•35 min
Curtis Dozier's The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate (Yale University Press, 2026) explores how white nationalist thought leaders use ancient Greece and Rome to claim historical precedent for their violent and oppressive politics. It is difficult to ignore the resurgence of white nationalist movements in the United States, many of which employ symbols and slogans from Greco-Roman antiquity. A long-established neo-Nazi website incorporates an imag...
Jun 13, 2026•1 hr 17 min
Surrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India (Oxford UP, 2026) explores the role of languages in the intellectual landscape of second-millennium India by way of six theological treatises composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, each written by a key intellectual figure: Vātsya Varadaguru, Periyavāccān Pillai, Meghanādari Sūri, Pillai Lokācārya, and Vedāntadeśika. Drawing on theories of language politics and translation, Manasicha Akepiyapo...
Jun 11, 2026•39 min
John Dewey is among history’s most celebrated thinkers on democracy and education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dewey as not only a reformer of schooling but also a profound theorist of human development, whose vision of the centrality of education to democracy, philosophy, and flourishing can still inspire us today. What can we learn from this great thinker as we face challenges such as widespread drudgery and di...
Jun 10, 2026•52 min
Athenian Democracy provides innovative readings of ancient theorists to reveal both the complexity of democracy's achievements and its limits. In Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists (U Notre Dame Press, 2026), noted political scientist Arlene W. Saxonhouse offers fresh and provocative explorations of ancient political theorists, lending new insights about democracy's foundations and principles. These insights are more relevant than ever in a moment when the viability of d...
Jun 10, 2026•58 min
What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors’ lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors’ own lives and works. Stal...
Jun 09, 2026•1 hr 8 min
In the Middle Ages, hell was useful because it was vaguely defined. Canonical scriptures scarcely mention hell, leaving much to the imaginations of early Christians, who used it to sort out who belonged within the faith. Translating hell: Vernacular theology and apocrypha in the medieval North Sea (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Stephen C. E. Hopkins explores how hell became a place for literary experiments with local challenges in theology and identity. Following the reception and tr...
Jun 08, 2026•1 hr 3 min
Veiling meant many things to the ancients. On women, veils could signify virtue, beauty, piety, self-control, and status. On men, covering the head could signify piety or an emotion such as grief. Late Roman mosaics show people covering their hands with veils when receiving or giving something precious. They covered their altars, doorways, shrines, and temples; and many covered their heads when sacrificing to their gods. Early Christian intellectuals such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa used thes...
Jun 08, 2026•1 hr 36 min
The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice (Princeton University Press, 2026) offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. Beautifully written, broad in scope, and bracingly original, it weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold’s rule over the Congo to Putin’s war in Ukraine. At its heart is Lawrence Douglas’s fresh interpretation of t...
Jun 03, 2026•52 min
In 1656, a young Amsterdam merchant was excommunicated by his Portuguese-Jewish community in the harshest terms it had ever used. Baruch Spinoza was accused of unspecified “horrifying heresies,” but the precise reasons for his expulsion remain a mystery. When he published his Theological-Political Treatise in 1670, which was condemned as “the most atheistic book ever written,” he began to reveal to the world what his heresies may have been. Yet ever since the eighteenth century, most readers and...
Jun 02, 2026•41 min
The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment have often been claimed for sociology. But, what does it mean to say these thinkers were sociologists, or at the very least precursors to the subject? Does it, for example, mean that intellectuals of 18th Century Scotland had the same concerns as we do today? Alternatively, does it mean we should think of sociology as an elite discipline, developed by men who were attached to power, albeit with some often critical insights? In turn, if we accept these t...
Jun 02, 2026•1 hr 34 min
Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals. So how did the rat become the symbol of one of history's deadliest diseases? In How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Christos Lynteris unravels this story by focusing on the Third Plague Pandemic, a global outbreak that began in China in the 1850s and claimed an est...
May 30, 2026•49 min
From The New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson’s writings on race that every American should read Among America’s Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal” enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledge...
May 30, 20260
The Wisdom of the Ancients: Four Ideas That Changed the World (Oxford UP, 2025) is about four cornerstones of modern thought that were put in place by people living in the ancient Mediterranean world. It covers approximately 2,000 years in time (from ca. 1000 BCE to 1000 CE) and spatially moves from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia (roughly, modern Iraq), through Greece and Rome, to the new Germanic states growing in what is now western Europe. The four ideas, as author H. A. Drake...
May 28, 2026•1 hr 35 min
A rich and immersive reinterpretation of the history of Western thought, The Evolution of Western Thought: Volume 1, From the Ancient World to Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025) – the first in a major trilogy – explores the transmission and development of philosophical ideas from Plato and Aristotle to Jesus, Paul, Augustine and Gregory the Great. Christopher Celenza recalibrates philosophy's story not as abstract argumentation but rather as lived practice: one aimed at excavating wisdom and sh...
May 27, 2026•1 hr 12 min
Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood. Timothy McCall's book Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy (Reaktion, 2023) explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, f...
May 25, 2026•4 min•Ep. 60
Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki , changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order. As the shape and scale of the world explained...
May 25, 2026•4 min•Ep. 142
What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number were the biggest you had a symbol for? If you were doing math in ancient Egypt, those were the rules: anything bigger broke math. As mathematician Richard Elwes shows i n Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7 ( Basic Books, 2026) this is the strange story of math. Even today, writing down some numbers is beyond us: try it with all the zeroes in a googo...
May 22, 2026•1 hr 5 min
Codex Vaticanus is often regarded as a pillar of New Testament scholarship, ancient, authoritative, and decisive. In From Erasmus to Maius: The History of Codex Vaticanus in New Testament Textual Scholarship (de Gruyter, 2024) published by De Gruyter in 2024, Dr An-Ting Yi shows that this status was anything but inevitable. Rather than focusing on the manuscript’s text, Dr Yi traces how Vaticanus gradually became authoritative. For centuries, it was known but rarely usable, constrained by restri...
May 21, 2026•1 hr 3 min
A central paradox of democracies is that they are always ruled by elites. What can democracy mean in this context? Today, it is often said that a populist revolt against elites is driving democratic politics throughout the West. But in Elites and Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2026), Hugo Drochon argues that democracy is more accurately and usefully understood as a perpetual struggle among competing elites—between rising elites and ruling elites. Real political change comes from the inte...
May 20, 2026•1 hr 4 min
Carlos Martins joins the New Books Network to discuss his book Fascism: Beyond Hitler and Mussolini (Desassossego, 2022) (in Portuguese Fascismos: Para Além de Hitler e Mussolini), a comparative study of fascist movements across Europe and beyond. Working from a rigorous definition of fascism based on its ideological content, Martins examines eight case studies, analysing these specific manifestations of fascism to identify what they had in common and what separated them. In this conversation, w...
May 18, 2026•1 hr 22 min
In Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind (Counterpoint Publishing, 2026), Dr. Paul Stob presents a tale of science and showmanship, ideology and enterprise, that provides not just a fascinating history of our country, but also crucial insight into the deep currents that continue to propel modern life. During the contentious and progressive antebellum era, the Fowler family preached a gospel of self-improvement to a nation eage...
May 15, 2026•45 min
Despite being a major figure of Haitian literature, Jean-Claude Charles (1949-2008) has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader's Guide (Liverpool UP, 2022) seeks to serve as an introduction to the work and universe of this unique and capital writer to an English-language readership. The essays in the collection are organized along three major axes: contextual articles, placing Charles' work within the larger Haitian literary landscape, punctual arti...
May 14, 2026•37 min
The field of Strategic Studies, which studies the use and threat of force for political purposes, has seen the repeated rise of concepts to dominate discourses and research agendas, only to eventually fall to the margins again. What explains this cyclical pattern? What are the consequences for our understanding of war? Reconceptualizing War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Chiara Libiseller examines these questions by likening the coming an...
May 12, 2026•52 min
We were joined by Angus Burgin, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and talked about how the arrival of the Internet remade life and politics in the 90s. Angus shared his thoughts on the motivations behind his upcoming book, which offers an intellectual history of the Internet. Lee Vinsel is a professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. Benjamin Waterhouse is a professor of History at UNC Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices....
May 11, 2026•1 hr 11 min
The 1960s in Japan have long been understood as a period of radical political engagement. But as political movements from Old Left Communism to New Left revolts appeared to fail in their efforts to revolutionize Japanese society, artists and intellectuals came to reject the ideals of postwar politics. Instead, they advocated withdrawing from political participation and making self-transformation the grounds for social change. This provocative book uncovers a paradox at the heart of the 1960s: ho...
May 10, 2026•43 min
While nationalism is a term that is often associated with instability, violence, extremism, terrorism, wars and even genocide, in fact most forms of nationalism are nonviolent. Beyond politics, it is a set of discourses and practices that shape economic, social, legal, and cultural life all over the globe. Siniša Malešević's Nationalism as a Way of Life: The Rise and Transformation of Modern Subjectivities (Cambridge University Press, 2025) explores the global rise and transformation of national...
May 04, 2026•1 hr 5 min
There was no more trenchant and substantive critic of the Left from the Left in the 1960s and 1970s than Bayard Rustin. Some liberals and leftists today valorize Rustin on the basis of his multiple oppressed identities and civil rights organizing. On the other hand, many others dismiss him for being compromised by his commitment to the Democratic Party or by his deep suspicion of the new forms of left activism that appeared in the mid-1960s. While Rustin certainly made some strategic mis-steps l...
May 04, 2026•44 min•Ep. 311
Today we think of land as the paradigmatic example of property, while in the past, the paradigmatic example was often a slave. In this seminal work, James Q. Whitman asserts that there is no natural form of ownership. Whitman dives deep into the long Western history of this transformation in the legal imagination – the transformation from the ownership of humans and other living creatures to the ownership of land. This change extended over many centuries, coming to fruition only on the threshold...
May 04, 2026•54 min•Ep. 605
