In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academ...

What happened when Americans and Soviets fought alongside one another against Hitler? How did relations at Poltava airbase reveal cracks in the Grand Alliance? Serhii Plokhy tells the story of personal relationships and high geopolitics in his new book Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance (Oxford University Press, 2...

In the United States in particular, there is almost no social space today, whether that’s Thanksgiving dinner or going shopping, that has not become saturated with political meaning. In Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place (Oxford University Press, 2019), Robert Talisse argues that contrary to what many democratic theorists have argued, democracy is something we can do too mu...

Today I talked to S. Deborah Kang about her book The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954, published by Oxford University Press in 2017. The INS on the Line explores the history behind Immigration and Naturalization Service throughout the 20th Century, interrogating how this agency was critical to the creation and re-creation of immigration law during this tim...

Carlton F. W. Larson is the author of The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2019). The Trials of Allegiance looks at the law of treason during the American Revolution, showing just how central treason is to understanding the course of the Revolution. Looking at Pennsylvania, Professor Larson provides readers with a comprehensive study of t...

Jonathan Rosa's new book Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the emergence of linguistic and ethnoracial categories in the context of Latinidad. The book draws from more than twenty-four months of ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork in a Chicago public school, whose student body is m...

Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Before WWII, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women's l...

According to an intuitive view, lives are meaningful when they manifest a directedness or instantiate a project such that the disparate events and endeavors “add up to” a life.  John Stuart Mill’s life certainly was devoted to a project in that sense.  Yet Mill’s life was in many respects unsatisfying – riven with anxiety and trauma.  What does Mill’s life teach us about meaningful lives? In John...

Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a...

In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford Univiersity Press, 2019), the eminent foreign policy scholar Michael Mandelbaum examines that remarkable quarter century, describing how and why the peace was established and then fell apart. To be sure, wars took place in this era, but less frequently and on a far sm...

In Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War (Oxford UP, 2019), Julia G. Young reframes the Cristero war as a transnational conflict, using previously unexamined archival materials from both Mexico and the United States to investigate the intersections between Mexico's Cristero War and Mexican migration to the United States during the late 1920s. She traces the formation,...

What’s the first image that comes to mind when you hear the words “Paris” and “photography”? Is it a famous photo, perhaps an Atget, Brassai, or Doisneau? In her new book, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860-1970 (Oxford UP, 2018), Catherine Clark explores the history of how and why photographic images have been central to understanding and imagining the city’s present a...

How did a Danish historian wind up with a human skull from colonial India in his University of London office? Kim A. Wagner’s The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857(Oxford University Press, 2018) tells two stories. The first concerns the way in which he came into possession of the skull of a Muslim soldier executed by the British in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1857, al...

The political protests of the “Red Shirts” movement in Thailand in April-May 2010 ended in tragedy, with the security forces killing over 90 people and injuring thousands more. Thailand’s political protests have been studied from many different angles, but perhaps the most unusual approach to this subject is to be found in Benjamin Tausig’s book, Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, & Constraint(Ox...

Robert Alexander’s new book, Representation and the Electoral College (Oxford UP, 2019) is an important analysis of the Electoral College, from the debates about it at the constitutional convention and during the early days of the republic to contemporary controversies that surround this unique construction. Alexander frames the book with the theoretical conundrum of representation, unpacking diff...

Sara Georgini is a historian and series editor for The Papers of John Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a family biography that explores the Christian republicanism of John and Abigail Adams and how it shaped their view of the origins and destiny of the American nation under the guidance of divi...

In Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2019), Charlie Laderman exposes the way that imperial ambitions suffused the ideas and practices of turn-of-century humanitarian intervention. Beginning his story in the late 19th century Ottoman Empire, Dr. Laderman demonstrates how the successive waves of...

The story of the creation of the Book of Mormon has been told many times, and often ridiculed. A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon (Oxford University Press, 2019), by Larry E. Morris, presents and examines the primary sources surrounding the origin of the foundational text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the most successful new religion of modern times. The scores of do...

Mahalia Jackson, the great mid-twentieth century gospel singer, thought of herself as an embodiment of the history of African Americans in the United States. She understood that her family’s background, as they moved from enslavement in Louisiana to farming in the same rural area to New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century and then her own move to Chicago with the Great Migration was...

As the wife of a Macedonian king and the mother of three sons who would succeed him, Eurydice played an important role in Macedonia at an important moment in the kingdom’s history. In Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power(Oxford University Press, 2019), Elizabeth Donnelly Carney draws upon recent archaeological findings and other sources to reconstruct her role as queen and queen mother durin...

In Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2018), Aaron Hale-Dorrell re-evaluates Khrushchev’s corn campaign as the cornerstone of his reformation programs. Corn was key to Khrushchev’s promises of providing everyone with the abundance required for achieving communism, which included the introduction of a varied diet rich in meat and...

Amanda L. Tyler is the author of Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay, published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Habeas Corpus in Wartime is a comprehensive history of the writ of habeas corpus in Anglo-America. From its early beginnings, to the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, to its suspension during the American Civil War, to WWII internment camps, to the W...

It is common to see science and religion portrayed as mutually exclusive and warring ways of viewing the world, but is that how actual scientists see it? For that matter, which cultural factors shape the attitudes of scientists toward religion? Could scientists help show us a way to build collaboration between scientific and religious communities, if such collaborations are even possible? The book...

The king’s guards became increasingly nervous as they watched nearly 7,000 individuals march on Versailles on October 5, 1789. The crowd approaching the king’s chateau was overwhelmingly composed of women who were determined to make their grievances known. Furious at the ever rising price and scarcity of bread, Parisian market women, known as Dames des Halles, joined with other revolutionaries to...

Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019) looks at the legion of children and teenagers who sold newspapers on city streets, moving trains, and even Civil War battlefields in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Author Vincent DiGirolamo, a history professor at Baruch College, is featured in this New Books Network/Gotham Center for New York City History podcast...