In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), David Stevenson examines a pivotal chapter of the First World War. Two and a half years of death and destruction had brought the belligerents to new nadirs of attrition and zeniths of strategic calculation. Deeply invested in the war, with unprecedented losses of blood and treasure, and no longer optimistic about their chances of...

Gregory Laski approaches the concept of democracy in his text, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2018) from a variety of dimensions and perspectives, integrating the concept of temporality to considerations of liberty and justice within an analysis of American political thought and history, especially in the period following the Civil War. Laski’s...

Are we good people? Or do we just think we are? In his new book The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (Oxford University Press, 2017), author Christian B. Miller tackles these questions and more, breaking down what character is, how to measure it, and how to distinguish good from bad moral behavior. In our interview, Miller talks to us about finding his way into this area of study and what research...

I was in graduate school during Bosnia and Rwanda. Like everyone else, I watched the video footage and journalistic accounts that came from these two zones of atrocity. Like everyone else, I wondered how humans could do such things to each other. And like everyone else, I asked in anguish “why can’t we do something.” Much of the scholarship about Rwanda focuses on this question. Most of it is good...

Though the preeminent English theologian of the 17th century, there is much about John Owen’s life which remains obscured to us today. One of the achievements of Crawford Gribben‘s new book John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford University Press, 2017) is to use Owen’s voluminous writings on religion to provide new insights into this critical Puritan figure. Born in 1616,...

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an important and fascinating book that not only tells the story of a remarkable woman’s life during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and Restoration. Based on a recently discovered cache of letters between Marie von Clausewitz and her renowned husband, Carl, it also dramatically expands our...

Much attention has been drawn to the role of white women in the recent Alabama senate election and the earlier election of Donald J. Trump as president. Today’s racial and gender politics have long historic roots, according to Elizabeth McRae, the author of Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Gillespie McRae is an associat...

In her latest book, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France (Oxford University Press, 2017), Sarah Fishman offers reader a social history of French families in the years that followed the Second World War. Fishman is focused here on illuminating the daily and practical lives of the men, women, and children who worked and often struggled to transition from wart...

Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas Salk: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2015), Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs chronicles the medical researcher whose success in developing a successful polio vaccine in the 1950s made him an international cele...

Kate Manne is an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University. As a feminist and moral philosopher, Manne examines an idea that has been inadequately addressed in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2017). She argues that misogyny is on the wane as a working concept and situates her analysis in recent news stories and events. She offers a definition that...

In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the ‘worst of the worst.’ The 1976 decision ushered in the ‘modern’ period of the US death penalty, resulting in the execution of over 1,400 inmates, with over 8,000 individuals currently sentenced to die. Each chapter...

Who do people turn to when they want to talk about serious issues in their life? Do they end up confiding in people they list as confidants? In his new book, Someone to Talk To (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mario Luis Small uses in-depth interviews with first-year graduate students to uncover how intimate conversations are executed in real time. This book is interesting in the way that the inte...

What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by psychology, anthropology, and other human-directed perspectives as these are constrained by evolution. In The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (Oxford University Press, 2017), Owen Fla...

How did African-American slaves react to slavery? What factors, particularly religion, might shape those reactions, even making them violent? Patrick Breen, in his carefully researched and cogently written The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (Oxford University Press, 2015) sheds light on these questions through a meticulous study of the slave rebellion led by...

Today I talked to Vicky Neale about her new book Closing the Gap: The Quest to Understand Prime Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2017). The book details one of the most exciting developments to happen in the last few years in mathematics, a new approach to the Twin Primes Conjecture. The story involves mathematicians from five different centuries and probably every continent except Antarctica. Vi...

The idea of being a “political prisoner” may seem timeless. If someone was imprisoned for his or her political beliefs, then that person is in some sense a “political prisoner.” Think of the Tower of London and its various occupants. But, as Padraic Kenney points out in his fascinating new book Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2017), the modern...

Monica Ricketts’ new book Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) presents readers with the connected histories of military cadres and intellectuals in Peru and Spain c. 1770-1830. The book advances the argument that a Crown-sponsored change in the idea of “merit” in the Spanish Empire made possible the rise to power...

Rapidly changing politics. Debates over the meaning of immigration. Widespread violence against minority groups. An economy undergoing a radical shift in form. The thirty years after the end of the Civil War have much in common with the United States in the second decade of the twenty first century, argues Stanford historian Richard White in The Republic for Which it Stands: The United States duri...

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” Thus begins Guenter Lewy’s latest book, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (Oxford University Press, 2017), a welcome attempt to challenge the idea that all Nazi perpetrators were the same, and that they were all driven by the same bass motivations. Largely a synthesis of material previously only available in Ger...

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and France was moving toward “civil war.” The source of this discontent? Nuclear power. Not weapons. Electricity. How did anti-nuclear protest become a debate about the future of society? What united farmers, housewives, hippies, and anarchists against the stat...

In Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017), Princeton University English Associate Professor Sarah Rivett studies how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Ameri...

Drawing on materials from archives in eight southern US states, Melissa Milewski’s Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to the Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines how African Americans utilized courts for disputes over property, personal injury, and workplace compensation, among other fields. She argues for...

In 1898, a new metropolis emerged from the consolidation of New York City with East Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the western part of Queens County. In Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mike Wallace describes the first two decades of this city’s expanded history, a period in which it led and embodied the developments that were taking...

Seeing is often a good reason for believing—when things go well. But suppose we have a case like this: Jill believes that Jack is angry, although she has no good grounds for this belief. Nevertheless, when she sees him, she sees his face as angry even though it is neutral. Is it reasonable for Jill to believe he is angry on the basis of what she sees? No, argues Susanna Siegel: her perception has...

In his recent book, The Buddha Party: How the People’s Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2016), John Powers presents a comprehensive overview of propaganda employed by the People’s Republic of China related to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, showing not only how Han Chinese come to believe it, but also how Tibetans work to resist it. Drawing on pr...