New Books in Early Modern History

Today's episode of "New Books in African American Studies" is special. Why, you might ask? Because today's episode marks my 100th episode on the NBN! To celebrate, I am chopping it up with my good brother, Dr. Marcus Nevius, Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island. In today's convo, Brotha Dr. Nevius and I discuss why he chose to become a historian, hi...

Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica and Slavery (Luath Press, 2022) by Kate Phillips traces the story of how and why thousands of Scots made money from buying and selling humans... a story we need to own. We need to admit that many Scots were enthusiastic participants in slavery. Union with England gave Scotland access to both trade and settlement in Jamaica, Britain’s richest colony and its major sl...

In addition to providing excerpts from classic tales of Japan’s warrior past, Samurai and the Warrior Culture of Japan, 471-1877: A Sourcebook (Hackett, 2022) draws on a wide range of lesser-known but revealing sources—including sword inscriptions, edicts, orders, petitions, and letters—to expand and deepen our understanding of the samurai, from the order’s origins in the fifth century to its abol...

Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse toward the sermon and sit through it, all the while scrutinized by local Christians, foreign visitors, and potential converts. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance (Princeton Uni...

Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, works of botany underwent a radical change in the English book trade. A genre that was once produced in smaller cheaper formats became lavishly produced, authoritative editions. But as Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade (Cambridge UP, 2022) shows, the relationships between making, producing, and consuming of botanical and medical kno...

In Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism (Routledge, 2021), Ruben Espinosa explores the works of the early modern dramatist in the context of Trump-era immigration policies, anti-Black police violence, and the enduring legacy of white supremacy in American life. Espinosa is Professor of English at Arizona State University. He is the author of the previous monograph, Masculinity and Marian Efficacy i...

In his dense yet delightful new book Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2022), Asad Ahmad examines in layered detail the textual and commentarial tradition on the discipline in logic in early modern and modern South Asia, while constantly connecting his study to broader Muslim intellectual currents beyond South Asia....

Black Christianity in America has long been studied as a blend of indigenous African and Protestant elements. Jeroen Dewulf redirects the conversation by focusing on the enduring legacy of seventeenth-century Afro-Atlantic Catholics in the broader history of African American Christianity. With homelands in parts of Africa with historically strong Portuguese influence, such as the Cape Verde Island...

Information is everywhere. We live in an “Information” Society. We can get more of it faster, quicker, and in more different shapes and sizes than at probably any other time in history. Meanwhile, misinformation (a very old word) and disinformation (a neologism of the 20th century) have worked their way into our collective cultural lexicon.  Like everything, information has a history and Informati...

A new history explores how one of Renaissance Italy's leading cities maintained its influence in an era of global exploration, trade, and empire. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was not an imperial power, but it did harbor global ambitions. After abortive attempts at overseas colonization and direct commercial expansion, as Brian Brege shows, Tuscany followed a different path, one that allowed it to pa...

Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Dr. Johanna Drucker provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Dr. Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contri...

For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike quickly turned into a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. By the time British troops had put down the rebels, more than a thousand Jamaicans lay dead from summary executions and extrajudicial murder. While the r...

Galilee, the region where monotheism multiplied, where Christianity came into being, where Judaism reinvented itself, and where Islam won some of its greatest triumphs. Matthew Silver's two volumes--The History of Galilee, 47 BCE to 1260 CE: From Josephus and Jesus to the Crusades (Lexington Books, 2021), and The History of Galilee, 1538-1949: Mysticism, Modernization, and War (Lexington Books, 20...

The Atlantic has borne witness to major historic events that have drastically shaped humanity with each crossing of its path. In A Brief History of the Atlantic (Robinson, 2022), Jeremy Black takes the reader through its evolution to becoming one of the most important oceans in the world. Black discusses the importance of the Atlantic in relation to world history as well as addressing topics such...

By the early eighteenth century, the economic primacy, cultural efflorescence, and geopolitical power of the Dutch Republic appeared to be waning. The end of this Golden Age was also an era of natural disasters. Between the late seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century, Dutch communities weathered numerous calamities, including river and coastal floods, cattle plagues, and an outbreak of strange...

Slavery and its lingering remnants remain a plague on the United States, continuing to foster animosity between races that hinders the understanding and connection conducive to dismantling the remains of such systems. Personal relationships and connection can provide a path towards reconciling differences and overcoming the racial divisiveness that is America’s original sin.  In his fascinating ne...

It’s the sixteenth century, and the Ottoman Empire has just defeated the Mamluk Sultanate, conquering Damascus and Cairo, important centers of Arab learning and culture. But how did these two groups–Arabs and “Rumis”, a term used to refer to those living in Anatolia, interact? How did Arabs deal with these powerful upstarts–and how did Rumis try to work with their learned, yet defeated, subjects?...

What is holding the oceans back from entirely flooding the earth? While a twenty-first century thinker may approach the answer to this question within a framework of gravity and geologic deep-time, Lindsay Starkey demonstrates in her monograph, Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond: Redefining the Universe Through Natural Philosophy, Religious Reformations, and Sea Voyaging (Amsterd...

In The Castle: A History (Yale University Press, 2022) Dr. John Goodall presents a vibrant history of the castle in Britain, from the early Middle Ages to the present day. The castle has long had a pivotal place in British life, associated with lordship, landholding, and military might, and today it remains a powerful symbol of history. But castles have never been merely impressive fortresses—they...

On the morning of Thursday 29 June 1682, a magpie came rasping, rapping and tapping at the window of a prosperous Devon merchant. Frightened by its appearance, his servants and members of his family had, within a matter of hours, convinced themselves that the bird was an emissary of the devil sent by witches to destroy the fabric of their lives. As the result of these allegations, three women of B...

In Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France (Yale University Press, 2021), Nina Gelbart, Professor of History and Anita Johnson Wand Professor of Women’s Studies at Occidental College, shares the stories of six, incredibly resourceful, and dedicated women who contributed substantially to the sciences of their time. While offering valuable comments on the challenges of wri...

The 1750s are remembered as a high point of China's Qing Dynasty: a time of power, prestige, and social harmony. But The Story of the Stone paints a different picture: one of harmful traditions, political corruption, and inter-generational conflict. Over 250 years later, it's one of the most loved novels in Chinese literature, with dozens of adaptations and an entire field of scholarship dedicated...

Joshua A. Fogel and Matthew Fraleigh's edited volume Sino-Japanese Reflections: Literary and Cultural Interactions between China and Japan in Early Modernity (de Gruyter, 2022) offers ten richly detailed case studies that examine various forms of cultural and literary interaction between Japanese and Chinese intellectuals from the late Ming to the early twentieth century. The authors consider effo...

Dr. Lisa Ford, Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, is the author of prize-winning monographs and a luminary in the field of global legal history. Her new book The King’s Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2021) traces how a different kind of British empire emerged out of the global Age of Revolutions. The book’s case studies span the globe,...

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam Xavier McNeil. Today’s podcast is special, not because this is the 99th episode of my New Books career, but because I get the chance to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Peter H. Wood completing the dissertation version of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 T...