Five hundred years ago, a flotilla landed on the coast of Yucatán under the command of the Spanish conquistador Hérnan Cortés. While the official goal of the expedition was to explore and to expand the Christian faith, everyone involved knew that it was primarily about gold and the hunt for slaves. That a few hundred Spaniards destroyed the Aztec empire--a highly developed culture--is an old chestnut, because the conquistadors, who had every means to make a profit, did not succeed alone. They en...
Jul 22, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 180•Transcript available on Metacast Owen Stanwood's newest book, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire (Oxford UP, 2019), places the history of Huguenot refugees in a global context, the first truly international history of the diaspora. In the early modern world these French Protestant exiles scattered around the world, fleeing persecution following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The story begins with dreams of Eden, as religious migrants sought to build perfect societies far from the political storms o...
Jul 22, 2023•53 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jul 21, 2023•59 min•Ep 104•Transcript available on Metacast In Indian philosophical traditions, a reflection in a mirror frequently serves as a metaphor, suggesting that just as a face in a mirror appears where it is not, so does consciousness. Mirror of Nature, Mirror of Self: Mirror of Self: Models of Consciousness in Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and Advaita Vedānta (Oxford UP, 2023) utilizes this metaphor to address metaphysical, epistemological, and theological problems within non-reductionist approaches to consciousness. Author Dimitry Shevchenko contends that co...
Jul 20, 2023•36 min•Ep 273•Transcript available on Metacast Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousve...
Jul 16, 2023•43 min•Ep 234•Transcript available on Metacast First taking hold of the American cultural imagination in the 1990s, the sexual purity movement of contemporary evangelicalism has since received considerable attention from a wide range of media outlets, religious leaders, and feminist critics. Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (Oxford UP, 2015) offers a history of this movement that goes beyond the Religious Right, demonstrating a link between sexual purity rhetoric and fears of national decline that has shaped American ide...
Jul 15, 2023•57 min•Ep 254•Transcript available on Metacast The 2016 election of Donald Trump focused people's minds on populism, and most of the attention paid to the subject since has been on the threat it poses to wealthy democracies. In Democracy Unmoored, Samuel Issacharoff takes a far wider-angle view of the phenomenon, covering countries from across the globe: Brazil, Poland, Argentina, Turkey, India, Hungary, Venezuela, and more. Just as importantly, he focuses on populism's attack on the institutions of governance. Democracy requires two critica...
Jul 15, 2023•56 min•Ep 394•Transcript available on Metacast Frank Jackson’s "Knowledge Argument" introduced the philosophical world to Mary the brilliant neuroscientist, who knows everything there is to know about the physical world while living in a completely black and white environment. Yet she seems to learn something new when she leaves the room for the first time and sees and smells a red rose. So is physicalism – the claim that everything, including conscious experience, is physical – false? In The Matter of Consciousness: From the Knowledge Argum...
Jul 10, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep 319•Transcript available on Metacast Why do American Black people generally have worse health than American White people? To answer this question, Keisha Ray's book Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People's Health (Oxford UP, 2023) dispels any notion that Black people have inferior bodies that are inherently susceptible to disease. This is simply false racial science used to justify White supremacy and Black inferiority. A genuine investigation into the status of Black people's health requires...
Jul 08, 2023•39 min•Ep 204•Transcript available on Metacast From vampire apocalypses, shark attacks, witches, and ghosts, to murderous dolls bent on revenge, horror has been part of the American cinematic imagination for almost as long as pictures have moved on screens. But why do they captivate us so? What is the drive to be frightened, and why is it so perennially popular? Why Horror Seduces (Oxford UP, 2017) addresses these questions through evolutionary social sciences.Explaining the functional seduction of horror entertainment, this book draws on cu...
Jul 08, 2023•47 min•Ep 169•Transcript available on Metacast Today I talked to Rotem Kowner about Tsushima (Oxford UP, 2022), which is part of the great battle series in Oxford University press. The Battle of Tsushima, in which the Japanese Imperial Navy defeated the Russian Imperial Navy, was unprecedented in many ways. It marks the first naval victory of an Asian power over a major European power; the most devastating defeat suffered by the Imperial Russian Navy in its entire history; and the only truly decisive engagement between two battleship fleets ...
Jul 07, 2023•54 min•Ep 124•Transcript available on Metacast Our Recall this Buck series, back in 2020 and 2021, explored the history of money, ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. We began by focusing on the rise of capitalism, the Bank of England, and how an explosion of liquidity changed everything. We were lucky to do so, just before the Pandemic struck, with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School, who recently published Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capital...
Jul 05, 2023•47 min•Ep 108•Transcript available on Metacast A new account of the Mediterranean economy in the 10th to 12th centuries, forcing readers to entirely rethink the underlying logic to medieval economic systems. Chris Wickham re-examines documentary and archaeological sources to give a detailed account of both individual economies, and their relationships with each other. Chris Wickham offers a new account of the Mediterranean economy in the tenth to twelfth centuries, based on a completely new look at the sources, documentary and archaeological...
Jul 03, 2023•50 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast 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, ...
Jul 02, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 168•Transcript available on Metacast For nearly two decades the renowned legal historian G. Edward White has been writing a multi-volume history of law in America. In his third and concluding volume, Law in American History, Volume III: 1930-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2019), he surveys the many developments in American law from the middle of the 20th century to the case of Bush v. Gore. One of the most important of these developments was the emergence of American jurisprudence, a philosophy of how judges should apply the law. A...
Jul 02, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep 191•Transcript available on Metacast Süleyman, who ruled the Ottoman Empire between 1520 and 1566, was a globally recognized figure during his lifetime. In Peerless Among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman (Oxford University Press, 2023), Kaya Şahin presents the life of this sultan, whose domain extended from Hungary to Iran, and from the Crimea to North Africa and the Indian Ocean. The wealth of his treasury, the strength of his armies, and his personality were much discussed by historians, poets, courtiers, diplomats ...
Jun 29, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 176•Transcript available on Metacast The Middle Ages is a term coined around 1450 to describe a thousand years of European History. In The Middle Ages: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2014), Miri Rubin provides an exploration of the variety, change, dynamism, and sheer complexity that the period covers. From the provinces of the Roman Empire, which became Barbarian kingdoms after c.450-650, to the northern and eastern regions that became increasingly integrated into Europe, Rubin explores the emergence of a truly global syste...
Jun 27, 2023•50 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jun 27, 2023•50 min•Ep 662•Transcript available on Metacast Wartime is not just about military success. Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 2023) tells a different story - about a group of remarkable economists who used their skills to help their countries fight their battles during the Chinese-Japanese War, Second World War, and the Cold War. 1935-55 was a time of conflict, confrontation, and destruction. It was also a time when the skills of economists were called upon to finance t...
Jun 26, 2023•35 min•Ep 138•Transcript available on Metacast Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of 'the death of the book' implied by the replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying twenty-first-century experiences of paranoia and literary apocalypse. It traces a twin fear of omniscience and oblivion ...
Jun 25, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Ep 106•Transcript available on Metacast From one of the country's most distinguished journalists, a revisionist and riveting look at the American politician whom history has judged a loser, yet who played a key part in the greatest social movement of the 20th century. During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention. The most pressing and controversial issue facing the delegates was not whom to nominate for president -the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive can...
Jun 21, 2023•55 min•Ep 226•Transcript available on Metacast Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. David Cressy is a work of social history examining community relationships, law, and seafaring over the long early modern period. It explores the politics of the coastline, the economy of scavenging, and the law of 'wreck of the sea' from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I to the end of the reign of George II. England's coastlines were heavily trafficked by naval and commercial shipping, but an unfortunate percentag...
Jun 21, 2023•56 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast Today I talked to John L. Rudolph about his book Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should) (Oxford UP, 2023). Few people question the importance of science education in American schooling. The public readily accepts that it is the key to economic growth through innovation, develops the ability to reason more effectively, and enables us to solve the everyday problems we encounter through knowing how the world works. Good science teaching results in all these benefits and more -- or so we think. Bu...
Jun 20, 2023•37 min•Ep 129•Transcript available on Metacast During the late nineteenth century concerns about international commercial rivalry were often expressed in terms of national provision for training and education, and the role of universities in such provision. It was in this context that the modern university discipline of economics emerged. The first undergraduate economics program was inaugurated in Cambridge in 1903; but this was merely a starting point. Constructing Economic Science: The Invention of a Discipline 1850-1950 (Oxford UP, 2022)...
Jun 18, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep 137•Transcript available on Metacast Lloyd Daniel Barba's book Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (Oxford UP, 2022) traces the development of Pentecostalism among Mexican-American migrant laborers in California's agricultural industry from the 1910s to the 1960s. At the time, Pentecostalism was often seen as a distasteful new sect rife with cultish and fanatical tendencies; U.S. growers thought of Mexicans as no more than a mere workforce not fit for citizenship; and industrial agriculture was celebrat...
Jun 16, 2023•25 min•Ep 105•Transcript available on Metacast Ethnoreligious Otherings and Passionate Conflicts (Oxford UP, 2022) lays bare the causal mechanisms that lead state and non-state actors to identify particular ethnoreligious groups as threats to security, power, and status. It focuses on the cases of Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Philippines to demonstrate how ethnoreligious others are transformed from strangers to enemies through passions, nationalism, and securitization. Advancing a novel ethnoreligious othering framework, the book offers a dis...
Jun 15, 2023•38 min•Ep 128•Transcript available on Metacast How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages, innumerable religious and intellectual movements have proposed answers to this question. Many have gravitated to the notion of the "subtle body," positing some sort of subtle entity that is neither soul nor body, but some mixture of the two. Simon Cox traces the history of this idea from the late Roman Empire to the present day, touching on how philosophers, wizards, scholars, occultists, psychologists, and mystics have engaged with the ide...
Jun 15, 2023•56 min•Ep 265•Transcript available on Metacast How would we eat if animals had rights? A standard assumption is that our food systems would be plant-based. But maybe we should reject this assumption. Indeed, this book argues that a future non-vegan food system would be permissible on an animal rights view. It might even be desirable. In Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford University Press, 2023), Josh Milburn questions if the vegan food system risks cutting off many people's pursuit of the 'good life', risks ex...
Jun 15, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast Accounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford UP, 2023) offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate ...
Jun 14, 2023•35 min•Ep 295•Transcript available on Metacast Since the 1990s, Germany has embarked on a daring campaign to restructure its energy system around renewable power, sparking a global revolution in solar and wind technology. But this pioneering energy transition has been plagued with problems. In Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change (Oxford UP, 2023), Stephen G. Gross explains the deeper origins of the Energiewende--Germany's transition to green energy--and offers the first comprehensive history of German energ...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast 
