There has been a recent trend in books that explore one year in detail: 1914, 1927, and 1968 have all received this treatment. E. Douglas Bomberger’s new book Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture from Oxford University Press (2018) is new twist on this phenomenon. Rather than primarily trace historical events while touching on cultural matters as many of these books do, Bomberger follows the events in jazz and classical music during this crucial year while framing them w...
Jun 13, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep 84•Transcript available on Metacast History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usual...
Jun 06, 2019•1 hr 17 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin's Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, “Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture?” In her new book, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Temple University Press, 2017), Heike Bauer answers this critical ...
May 23, 2019•43 min•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, if not indeed on the entire planet, explores the forty-one years from the beginning of the Great War in August 1914 to the surrender of Japan in August 1945. This book provides the reader with an innovative global military history that joins three periods—World War I, the interwar years, and World War ...
May 22, 2019•51 min•Ep 503•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader (Yale University Press, 2018), Stephen Fritz professor of history at East Tennessee State University reexamines Hitler as a military commander and strategist. That Hitler saw World War II as the only way to retrieve Germany’s fortunes and build an expansionist Thousand-Year Reich is uncontroversial. But while his generals did sometimes object to Hitler’s tactics and operational direction, they often made the same errors in judgment ...
May 21, 2019•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed key developments in LGBT history, including the growth of the world's first homosexual organizations and gay and lesbian magazines, as well as an influential community of German sexologists and psychoanalysts. In his new book, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945 (Harrington Park Press, 2016), Clayton Whisnant describes these events in detail, from vibrant gay social scenes to the Nazi persecution th...
May 08, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast In his book, Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Dr. Henning Pieper, examines the conduct of the SS Cavalry Brigade during World War II. The SS Cavalry Brigade was a unit of the Waffen-SS that differed from other German military formations as it developed a dual role: SS cavalrymen both helped to initiate the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and experienced combat at the front. Pieper’s book highlights an understudied asp...
Apr 30, 2019•56 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance (Yale University Press, 2018), Christian Goeschel, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Manchester, examines the relationship between Hitler and Mussolini and how their relationship developed and affected both countries. In this highly readable book, Goeschel, revisits all of Mussolini and Hitler’s key meetings and asks how these meetings constructed a powerful image of a strong Fascist-Nazi rel...
Apr 02, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on ...
Mar 19, 2019•32 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast The Lied is one of the most important genres of nineteenth-century Romantic music, and one of the most intriguing. Balanced between public and private performance, an expression of both poetic and musical meaning, musicologists have tended to study Lieder by analyzing the connections between the music and text. In her new book Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century published by Indiana University Press in 2018, Dr. Jennifer Ronyak studies a set of Lieder with texts s...
Mar 07, 2019•51 min•Ep 82•Transcript available on Metacast In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone inte...
Feb 26, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast Martin Buber is known as one of the 20th century's greatest Jewish scholars and thinkers, but he is less well known for his political theory and activism. In Martin Buber's Theopolitics (Indiana University Press, 2018), Samuel Hayim Brody demonstrates how Buber sees the bible as providing a blueprint for a state in which leadership ultimately belongs to God, and association through the (significantly reduced) mechanisms of state is voluntary. Brody's book provides a significant new perspective o...
Feb 18, 2019•40 min•Ep 163•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book, Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), Dagmar Herzog examines the relationship between reproductive rights and disability rights in contemporary European history. In a study that appeared in the George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History, Herzog uncovers much that is unexpected. She analyzes Protestant and Catholic theologians that were pro-choice in the 1960s and 19...
Jan 25, 2019•43 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast What can the lives of journalists under Hitler and Adenauer reveal? How did they navigate the Third Reich as "internal emigrants"? How did the emerging Cold War shape new tensions with their government and publishers? Volker Berghahn examines the lives and careers of three media giants with his latest book Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany(Princeton University Press, 2019). In it, Berghan's exploration of German journalists...
Jan 18, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast In Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Algonquin Books, 2018), Tim Mohr examines East Germany punk rock and its role in the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Starting in the late 1970s, a small group of East Berlin teens started listening to the Sex Pistols through British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin. Punk became life-changing. With so much future dictated for teens by the East German dictatorship, punk was a revolutionary ...
Jan 17, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast After years of being overlooked, there has been a growing interest among academic historians in the history of Turkish Guest Workers in West Germany. In her new book, Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Sarah Thomsen Vierra examines the experience of Turkish immigrants in Berlin. Focused on social history, she synthesized evidence from oral histories, archives, memoirs, and newspapers. Building upon ...
Jan 14, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast How did the search for Nazi fugitives become a vehicle to oppose South American dictatorships? Daniel Stahl’s award-winning new book traces the story of three continents over the course of half a century in Hunt for Nazis: South America's Dictatorships and the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Through a rich transnational history, Daniel traces the ebb and flow of political will alongside the cooperation between far flung governments and civil society groups. The res...
Dec 26, 2018•55 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Brian Crim, Associate Professor of History at the University of Lynchburg, looks at the controversial program to bring German scientist to the United States after World War II. The book draws on recently declassified documents from the Department of Defense, State Department, the FBI and other intelligence agencies to show how these German scientists were incorporated into mili...
Dec 21, 2018•1 hr•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast It has long been assumed that stability was imposed on Germany after World War II; that the United States in particular taught Germans, among other things, how to be “good democrats” and to value cultural pluralism. In his latest book,Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2017), Noah Benezra Strote challenges this idea, arguing that it was Germans themselves who rebuilt the country after 1945. Focusing particularly on the country’s fame...
Dec 13, 2018•1 hr 19 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the bo...
Dec 06, 2018•1 hr 4 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts(Yale University Press, 2017, Daniel Siemens, professor of European history at Newcastle University, writes a comprehensive history of the SA, from the early 1920s until Nazi Germany’s total defeat in 1945. Siemens demonstrates how the SA evolved from a small organization to a massive and potent force that directly impacted the Nazi rise to power, and how that organization shaped German society during the Nazi period. He tackle...
Nov 28, 2018•49 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast What can the Weimar Republic teach us about how democracies fail? How could the same vibrancy that gave us cultural touchstones spawn Nazism? In his new book Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eric D. Weitz challenges the belief that the fledgling democracy was doomed to fail. In an encompassing examination of the short-lived republic’s political, economic, intellectual, and cultural life, Eric skillfully weaves vivid stories into a overarching narrative. His...
Nov 20, 2018•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast In A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society (Indiana University Press, 2018), edited by Michael Brenner, Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich and Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at the American University in Washington DC, has assembled a number of scholars to give a comprehensive account of German Jews and Judaism from the Holocaust to the early 21st century. This volume will be the essential text on the topic fo...
Nov 12, 2018•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Like most philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche is better known for his ideas than for the life he led. In I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), Sue Prideaux details the events of his life and shows how they can inform many of the concepts for which he is best known. The son of a clergyman, Nietzsche excelled at university and became a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel without even taking a degree. It was at that time he began a long-term friendship ...
Oct 24, 2018•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Telling the history of the Holocaust in Hungary has long meant telling the story of 1944. Raz Segal, in his new book Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2016), reminds us that this is only part of the story, and that focusing on 1944 misleads us about the nature of the violence in Hungary and in much of Eastern Europe. Segal’s book examines at a small area in the Carpathian mountains. By beginning in the 1800s, he is able to...
Oct 17, 2018•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016), Dr. Susan Carruthers, professor of American Studies at the University of Warwick, chronicles America’s transition from wartime combatant to post-war occupier in both Germany and Japan. This excellent book examines occupation by exploring the thoughts and feelings of ordinary servicemen and women who participated in the difficult task of rebuilding defeated nations. By examining occu...
Oct 15, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018), Bradley W. Hart, assistant professor at California State University, Fresno, examines Nazi sympathizers, noninterventionists, and others in American who advocated for Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Hart looks at a wide array of groups and individuals in his study, from the German-American Bund, the Silver Legion, religious leaders, members of Congress and of c...
Oct 12, 2018•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast To be quite honest, I had no idea there were any Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen. That’s perhaps an unusual way to begin a blog post. But it reflects a real gap in the literature about the Holocaust, one that Sara J. Brenneis identifies and fills in her new book Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015 (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Brenneis is interested in the ways Spanish prisoners (most of whom had fled Spain the aftermath of the Republican defea...
Oct 10, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast The failure of democracy during the Weimar Republic is currently at the center of public discussion due to the global populist wave of the last few years. In his new book, Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Larry Eugene Jones examines how the republic’s final presidential election contributed to its dissolution. He synthesizes evidence from a vast number of German archives as well as a career spent as a...
Oct 08, 2018•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast What voices have been silenced in the history of the Holocaust? How did victims and perpetrators make sense of their experiences? How did the failed pursuit of post-war justice shape public memory? In her new book Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018), Mary Fulbrook uses diaries, memoirs, and trials to recover the full spectrum of suffering and guilt. By exposing the disconnect between official myths and unspoken realities of post-war ...
Sep 27, 2018•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
