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New Books in History: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Marshall Poe
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.comSubscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetworkSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- Sep 21, 20261h 38m
Glenn Peers, "Strange and Familiar History of Byzantine Art: Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy" (ARC Humanities Press, 2026)
Strange and Familiar History of Byzantine Ar: Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy (ARC Humanities Press, 2026) represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and self-reflection as a way to model an open-ended and faceted art history. Modern works of film, fiction, and art likewise appear frequently so that the Byzantine objects can emerge as both more strange and more familiar, and as both of the past and of our world. Their capacity for holding multiple times, generating multiple meanings, and for multiple subjectivities is fully embraced, and perhaps a different kind of art history emerges, one that eschews argument and mastery for humility, openness, empathy—thinking with, rather than about.New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew ReviewGlenn Peers is Emeritus Professor, Art History at University of Texas Austin and Syracuse UniversityMichael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Sep 21, 202647 min
Katherine Grandjean, "Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution" (Random House, 2026)
Kentucky, 1798: A harrowing series of murders begins. The first body, discovered by cattle drovers, lies bloody at the bottom of a ridge. Then another—a dead boy staring up from a sinkhole. Bodies turn up along roadsides, stuffed into brush. They float to the surface of muddy brooks. For nine terrifying months, over hundreds of miles of Kentucky and Tennessee countryside, the terror unfolds. The killers—two men with hazy backgrounds—are brothers, named Wiley and Micajah Harp.The Harps killed dozens, but why they did it has eluded folklorists and historians for generations. Almost every story imagines that their motive was pure bloodlust, but for historian Katherine Grandjean, that’s too simple. Instead, she uses the Harp murders to reveal the dark side of the young United States’ independence. These were uncertain and dangerous years—a time when the fledgling federal government could do little to protect its citizens. And if the American Revolution was liberating, it was also deeply destabilizing, politically and socially. Even as it built up some men, it stacked the deck against others, punishing them with volatile markets, lost safety nets, and shattered aspirations. Unspooling the mystery of what sent the Harps reeling exposes the hidden, violent legacies of the revolutionary era.Bristling with tense, page-turning storytelling—and driven by a historian’s obsessive detective work—Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution (Random House, 2026) recovers these long-forgotten murders as a haunting tale about the darkness at the heart of the American dream. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Sep 20, 202652 min
Pablo F. Gomez, "Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
In my conversation with Professor Pablo F. Gómez about his new book, Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026.Our conversation explored the unsettling relationship between slavery, the body, measurement, and knowledge. What does it mean to measure a human body within a system that has already reduced that person to a commodity? And what happens when numbers that appear neutral become entangled with violence, commerce and exploitation?What stayed with me is the book’s invitation to think differently about numbers. Behind measurements of height, weight, health, disease and mortality were human beings whose lives could not be contained by the data recorded about them.These questions are not only historical. We live in an increasingly quantified world, where bodies, health, productivity and risk are constantly measured and transformed into data.So perhaps one question we should keep asking is: Who is doing the counting, why are they counting, and what happens to the people being counted?I invite you to listen to our conversation and reflect with us on the histories behind the numbers we encounter today. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Sep 18, 202648 min
Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, "Pierogi: An American Story of Polish Food" (Columbia UP, 2026)
Today, pierogi are the most recognizable Polish food in the United States and a symbol of Polish American identity. How did this humble dish attain such lofty status?In Pierogi: An American Story of Polish Food (Columbia UP, 2026), Professor Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann explores the surprising history of pierogi, tracing how Polish cuisine evolved in the multiethnic landscape of the United States. When Polish immigrants crossed the ocean, they brought with them their traditional cuisine, which came to signify enduring attachment to homeland, family, religion, and culture. In time, they as well as new generations and new immigrant waves gradually transformed Polish American culinary culture, reflecting food trends and changes in the United States, Poland, and the world.Pierogi takes readers into the kitchens where Polish American families, friends, and community organizations carry on the custom of cooking and eating together. Dr. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann highlights small- and large-scale pierogi producers who adapted traditional dishes for the US market and food celebrities who mainstreamed them, and she traces the symbolic representation of pierogi in popular culture. She also shares personal stories, from her family’s resourcefulness in communist-era Poland facing near-constant food shortages to her experiences as an immigrant to the United States in the 1980s. Drawing on sources from historical and recent cookbooks to interviews with Polish American entrepreneurs and community members, this book offers new insights for anyone interested in East Central European and American foodways.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Sep 17, 202653 min
Christina E. Firpo, "Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam" (Columbia UP, 2025)
During the interwar years, Vietnamese society witnessed a rapid change in the way women looked. Rejecting the model of a sequestered maiden with blackened teeth and long hair, they embraced a vivid palette of colors—and a colorful lifestyle to match. Before the war, Vietnam would have seemed like an unlikely place for a beauty industry to thrive. Virtuous young women were expected to hide their natural beauty, not manipulate it with makeup or flaunt it at a beauty contest. Yet ordinary women began seeking out the latest fashions—to great public consternation.In Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam (Columbia UP, 2025), Christina E. Firpo explores the development of beauty culture in this period, showing how women’s faces and bodies became contested sites for envisioning what it meant to be Vietnamese in the modern world. She considers dress patterns, lip-lining tutorials, hairstyles, physiques, and beauty pageants alongside new technologies of media, transportation, and leisure and the anxieties they provoked. The everyday decisions women made about their appearance, Firpo argues, were ways to stake a claim to the roles they wanted to play in the new society taking shape around them. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam (Columbia University Press, 2026) offers fresh insight into the tumultuous political, economic, social, and cultural changes that swept across Vietnam during this crucial period.Christina E. Firpo is professor of history at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She is the author of Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945 (Cornell University Press, 2020) and The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 (University of Hawai'i Press, 2016).Camellia (Linh) Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research focuses on 20th-century Vietnamese literature, socialist realism, and literary translation in Vietnam across French, Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. She can be reached at cpham@g.harvard.edu. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Sep 17, 202657 min
Darinee Alagirisamy, "Sober State: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
What happens when a democratic state—still in the process of formation—commits to banning a substance, especially one as controversial as alcohol? Sober State: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) traces the origins and evolution of alcohol prohibition in India, drawing on extensive archival research and rich vernacular sources to explain its surprising resilience over time. Since its inception, prohibition has served both as an ideal and a tool of state power—a dual role that has worked to shape its shifting trajectories. Each phase of enforcement has served to reaffirm prohibition's founding logic, thereby further embedding it in the machinery of governance—even as it has constrained its future implementation. Foregrounding intersections with caste and gender, the book illuminates how diverse social responses have made prohibition a deeply contested—sobering—yet enduring project. While prohibition may be a thing of the past in the West, history helps to keep it alive in India. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Sep 16, 20261h 23m
Lily Geismer on the Democratic Party in the 1990s
In this episode, hosts Lee Vinsel and Ben Waterhouse, along with producer Joe Forte, chat with historian Lily Geismer. Their conversation covers the evolution of the Democratic party, what it means to study political science as history, and a bit about how a scholar’s work can emerge from their personal experience and identity. Lily is Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College and the author of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (2015) and Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (2022). She teaches contemporary history and is a key participant in a group of scholars working to rethink and revitalize our approach to political history of the United States. One product of those collaborations has been her edited volume, with Brent Cebul, Mastery and Drift: Professional Class Liberals since the 1960s (2025). This conversation was recorded in July of 2026. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Sep 16, 202632 min
Giuseppe Motta, "Jewish Refugees and the International Community Between the Two World Wars: Beyond the State" (Routledge, 2026)
In this episode of New Books Network, Željko Stanojević speaks with historian Giuseppe Motta about Jewish Refugees and the International Community Between the Two World Wars: Beyond the State (Routledge, 2026), a study of Jewish displacement, statelessness, humanitarian action, international law, and international institutions between the First and Second World Wars.Drawing on extensive archival research in the records of the League of Nations and the Joint Distribution Committee, Motta reconstructs the political and legal environment in which Jewish refugees from East-Central Europe struggled to find protection after the collapse of empires and the redrawing of national borders. The book follows the refugee question from the aftermath of World War I through the rise of Nazism and the Évian Conference of 1938, asking how states, international organizations, humanitarian agencies, and Jewish institutions responded to people increasingly left outside effective national protection.A central theme of the conversation is the tension captured in the subtitle, Beyond the State. The interwar refugee crisis exposed a basic contradiction: refugees required protection that crossed national borders, while international law remained dependent on the sovereignty and political choices of individual states. Motta explains how the Jewish refugee question became connected to statelessness, minority protection, humanitarian responsibility, migration control, legal identity, and international cooperation across Europe.The discussion also explores the wider forces surrounding Jewish displacement: the legacies of World War I, new states in Central and Eastern Europe, nationalism, antisemitism, Bolshevism, Zionism, migration policy, and the restrictive political climate of the 1920s and 1930s. Particular attention is given to the League of Nations and the Joint Distribution Committee, whose archives reveal both institutional debates and the practical difficulties faced by refugees seeking safety and legal recognition.Rather than treating Jewish refugees only as a prelude to the Holocaust, Motta places the interwar period in its own historical and legal context. This perspective helps explain how ideas later central to international refugee law and human rights developed through earlier crises, experiments, failures, and negotiations.Giuseppe Motta is Associate Professor of History of International Relations at Sapienza University of Rome and a member of the Editorial Board of the European Hebrew Journal (EHJ).Motta will also speak at the European Hebrew Journal International Online Conference, New Discoveries and New Directions in Biblical, Hebrew, and Theological Studies. On 7 November 2026 at 19:00 CET, he will lead a live scholarly debate based on this book. His biography, book information, presentation details, and conference session are available on Giuseppe Motta’s conference page.The interview is hosted by Željko Stanojević, President of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature, Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of the European Hebrew Journal, and a New Books Network host in Biblical Studies. The Belgrade-based Institute promotes international scholarship in Hebrew language, Jewish studies, Biblical studies, Semitic studies, history, religion, and related interdisciplinary fields.Keywords and themes: Jewish refugees, interwar Europe, League of Nations, Joint Distribution Committee, statelessness, Jewish migration, Évian Conference, antisemitism, minority rights, humanitarianism, refugee law, international law, East-Central Europe, Jewish history, human rights, nationalism, international relations, refugee protection. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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About New Books in History
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.comSubscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetworkSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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