Episodes

  • On Barak, "Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet" (U California Press, 2024)

    On Barak, "Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet" (U California Press, 2024)
    Mar 10 2025
    Despite the flames of record-breaking temperatures licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What acquired habits and conveniences allow us to turn a blind eye with an air of detachment? Using examples from the hottest places on earth, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet (U California Press, 2024) shows how scientific methods of accounting for heat and modern forms of acclimatization have desensitized us to climate change. Ubiquitous air conditioning, shifts in urban planning, and changes in mobility have served as temporary remedies for escaping the heat in hotspots such as the twentieth-century Middle East. However, all of these measures have ultimately fueled not only greenhouse gas emissions but also a collective myopia regarding the impact of rising temperatures. I Identifying the scientific, economic, and cultural forces that have numbed our responses, this book charts a way out of short-term thinking and towards meaningful action. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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    43 mins
  • Jamie Jelinski, "Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024)

    Jamie Jelinski, "Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024)
    Mar 10 2025
    In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients. From this early example of tattooing as work, in Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) Dr. Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detours to the United States, England, and Japan as he traces the evolution of commercial tattooing in Canada over more than one hundred years. Needle Work offers insight into how tattoo artists navigated regulation, the types of spaces they worked in, and the dynamic relationship between the images they tattooed on customers and other forms of visual culture and artistic enterprise. Merging biographical narratives with an examination of tattooing’s place within wider society, Dr. Jelinski reveals how these commercial image makers bridged conventional gaps between cultural production and practical, for-profit work, thereby establishing tattooing as a legitimate career. Richly illustrated and drawing on archives, print media, and objects held in institutions and private collections across Canada and beyond, Needle Work provides a timely understanding of a vocation that is now familiar but whose intricate history has rarely been considered. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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    55 mins
  • Kristin A. Olbertson, "The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

    Kristin A. Olbertson, "The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
    Mar 9 2025
    The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Kristin Olbertson is the first comprehensive study of criminal speech in eighteenth-century New England, traces how the criminalization, prosecution, and punishment of speech offenses in Massachusetts helped to establish and legitimate a social and cultural regime of politeness. Analyzing provincial statutes and hundreds of criminal prosecutions, Dr. Olbertson argues that colonists transformed their understanding of speech offenses, from fundamentally ungodly to primarily impolite. As white male gentility emerged as the pre-eminent model of authority, records of criminal prosecution and punishment show a distinct cadre of politely pious men defining themselves largely in contrast to the vulgar, the impious, and the unmanly. “Law,” as manifested in statutes as well as in local courts and communities, promoted and legitimized a particular, polite vision of the king's peace and helped effectuate the British Empire. In this unique and fascinating work, Dr. Olbertson reveals how ordinary people interacted with and shaped legal institutions. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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    46 mins
  • Kirsten L. Scheid, "Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920–1950" (Indiana UP, 2022)

    Kirsten L. Scheid, "Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920–1950" (Indiana UP, 2022)
    Mar 9 2025
    In Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920–1950 (Indiana UP, 2022), Kirsten L. Scheid offers a striking study of both modern art in Lebanon and modern Lebanon through art. By focusing on the careers of Moustapha Farrouk and Omar Onsi, forefathers of an iconic national repertoire, and their rebellious student Saloua Raouda Choucair, founder of an antirepresentational, participatory art, Scheid traces an emerging sense of what it means to be Lebanese through the evolution of new exhibition, pedagogical, and art-writing practices. She reveals that art and artists helped found the nation during French occupation, as the formal qualities and international exhibitions of nudes and landscapes in the 1930s crystallized notions of modern masculinity, patriotic femininity, non-sectarian religiosity, and citizenship. Examining the efforts of painters, sculptors, and activists in Lebanon who fiercely upheld aesthetic development and battled for new forms of political being, Fantasmic Objects offers an insightful approach to the history and formation of modern Lebanon. Yasemin Ipek is an anthropologist, teacher, researcher, and author who is passionate about pursuing peace, love, truth, and justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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    1 hr and 32 mins
  • Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850" (UNC Press, 2025)

    Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850" (UNC Press, 2025)
    Mar 9 2025
    Most US history textbooks contain a familiar map: shaded colors stretch across North America, clearly and neatly demarcating the extent of US expansion from 1776 thru the late nineteenth century. In The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limites of Manifest Destiny (UNC Press, 2025), University of Kansas distinguished historian Andrew Isenberg asks us to rethink the clean lines and simple borders of the North American past. By examing the stories of escaped enslaved people, Christian missionaries, government vaccination campaigns, anti-slavery schemes, and even well worn historical events like Lewis and Clark and the Lousiana Purchase, Isenberg shows that American power at its borders fell far short of expectations in Washington, and often doesn't match up to historical interpretations in our present day. Rather, American hegemony in the borderlands was contingent, weak, and anything but assured, until well into the nineteenth century. Rather than Manifest Destiny, Isenberg argues that American expansion both west and south should be viewed as one of just many possible outcomes of the boistrous mess that was early North American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Andrew G. Walder, "Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution on China's Southern Periphery" (Stanford UP, 2023)

    Andrew G. Walder, "Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution on China's Southern Periphery" (Stanford UP, 2023)
    Mar 9 2025
    Guangxi, a region on China's southern border with Vietnam, has a large population of ethnic minorities and a history of rebellion and intergroup conflict. In the summer of 1968, during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution, it became notorious as the site of the most severe and extensive violence observed anywhere in China during that period of upheaval. Several cities saw urban combat resembling civil war, while waves of mass killings in rural communities generated enormous death tolls. More than one hundred thousand died in a few short months. These events have been chronicled in sensational accounts that include horrific descriptions of gruesome murders, sexual violence, and even cannibalism. Only recently have scholars tried to explain why Guangxi was so much more violent than other regions. With evidence from a vast collection of classified materials compiled during an investigation by the Chinese government in the 1980s, Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution on China's Southern Periphery (Stanford UP, 2023) reconsiders explanations that draw parallels with ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Bosnia, and other settings. It reveals mass killings as the byproduct of an intense top-down mobilization of rural militia against a stubborn factional insurgency, resembling brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in a variety of settings. Moving methodically through the evidence, Andrew Walder provides a groundbreaking new analysis of one the most shocking chapters of the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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    1 hr and 26 mins
  • Lina-Maria Murillo, "Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands" (UNC Press, 2025)

    Lina-Maria Murillo, "Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands" (UNC Press, 2025)
    Mar 9 2025
    The first birth control clinic in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1937. Since then, Mexican-origin women living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez have confronted various interest groups determined to control their reproductive lives, including a heavily funded international population control campaign led by Planned Parenthood Federation of America as well as the Catholic Church and Mexican American activists. Uncovering nearly one hundred years of struggle, Lina-Maria Murillo reveals how Mexican-origin women on both sides of the border fought to reclaim autonomy and care for themselves and their communities. Faced with a family planning movement steeped in eugenic ideology, working-class Mexican-origin women strategically demanded additional health services and then formed their own clinics to provide care on their own terms. Along the way, they developed what Murillo calls reproductive care— quotidian acts of community solidarity—as activists organized for better housing, education, wages, as well as access to birth control, abortion, and more. In Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands (UNC Press, 2025), Murillo lays bare Mexican-origin women's long battle for human dignity and power in the borderlands as reproductive freedom in Texas once again hangs in the balance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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    1 hr and 11 mins
  • Jeremy Black, "A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Jeremy Black, "A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Mar 8 2025
    Since their origins in eighteenth-century England, railroads have spread across the globe, changing everything in their path, from where and how people grew and made things to where and how they lived and moved. Railroads rewrote not only world geography but also the history of maps and mapping. Today, the needs of train companies and their users continue to shape the maps we consume and consult. Featuring full-color maps primarily from the British Library's distinguished collection--many of them never before published--A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps is the first international history of railroads and railroad infrastructure told through maps. Jeremy Black includes examples from six continents, spanning a variety of uses from railroad planning and operations to guides for passengers, shippers, and tourists. Arranged chronologically, the maps are accompanied by explanatory text that sheds light on the political, military, and urban development histories associated with the spread of railroads. A final chapter considers railroad maps from games, books, and other cultural artifacts. For anyone interested in the history of railroads or maps, A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps (U Chicago Press, 2024) will offer new and unexpected insights into their intertwined global history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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    47 mins