New Books in History

How did Native Americans make war, not with European settlers, but amongst themselves? Historian Wayne E. Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores this often-neglected question in his book, The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023).  The podcast begins with his explanation of the ‘...

Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a disp...

Evoking the political intrigue of the Gilded Age, Laurence Jurdem's book The Rough Rider and the Professor: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Friendship that Changed American History (Simon and Schuster, 2023) chronicles the extraordinary thirty-five-year friendship between President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Theodore Roosevelt was a uniquely g...

Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt tells a new story about the history of the music business and the ten technological advances that disrupted it over the last century. In recent years, narratives about the music industry tend to hew to a common theme: it was humming along for decades until the In...

Yael A. Sternhell's War on Record: The Archive and the Aftermath of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2023) is a history of the United States' greatest archival project and how it has shaped what we know about the Civil War. The Civil War generated a vast archive of official records--documents that would shape the postwar era and determine what future generations would know about the war. Yael...

In The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock 'n' Roll to Synthwave (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Nate Patrin examines how the link between film and song endures as more than a memory. It is, in fact, a sort of cultural symbiosis that has mutually influenced movies and pop music, a phenomenon Patrin tracks through the past fifty years, revealing the power of music in movies...

Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left m...

John D. Hosler's book Seven Myths of Military History (Hackett Publishing, 2022) "offers snapshots of seven pernicious myths in military history that have been perpetrated on unsuspecting students, readers, moviegoers, game players, and politicians. It promotes awareness of how myths are created by 'the spurious misuse and ignorance of history' and how misleading ideas about a military problem, as...

Russia and China, the largest and most populous countries in the world, respectively, have maintained a delicate relationship for four centuries. In addition to a four-thousand-kilometer border, they have periodically shared a common outlook on political and economic affairs. But they are, in essence, profoundly different polities and cultures, and their intermittent alliances have proven difficul...

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the French government cultivated images of sensual and sophisticated white French women in an attempt to reestablish its global image as a great nation. They promoted the beauty, sexual appeal, and general allure of French women, all while shrinking the boundaries of what was considered beautiful. Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France ...

Huw Bennett is a Reader in International Relations at Cardiff Unviersity. He specializes in strategic studies, the history of war, and intelligence studies, and work on both historical and contemporary issues concerning the use of military power. His research focuses on the experiences of the British Army since 1945, in the contexts of British politics, the Cold War, the end of empire, and the War...

A compelling study of medical and literary imaginations, Anne Linton's Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the complex relationship between modes of seeing, thinking, and writing intersex bodies and lives.  In this project, Linton brings a rich archive of medical cases from 1800 to 1902 into dialogue with canonical nineteenth-ce...

Uncovering the hidden history of Islamophobia and its surprising connections to the long-standing hatred of Jews. Hatred of Jews and hatred of Muslims have been intertwined in Christian thought since the rise of Islam. In Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy (U California Press, 2023), David M. Freidenreich explores the history of this complex, perplexing, and emotionally fra...

Today I talked to Brian Maxson about his new book Early Modern Europe: Facts and Fictions (Bloomsbury, 2023).  Through the exploration of nine common myths about the history and culture of early modern Europe, roughly 1350-1700, this book uses common assumptions to introduce newcomers to the period and its key figures, developments, and events. Many myths about early modern Europe originated in th...

Animal products were used extensively in nineteenth-century Britain. A middle-class Victorian woman might wear a dress made of alpaca wool, drape herself in a sealskin jacket, brush her hair with a tortoiseshell comb, and sport feathers in her hat. She might entertain her friends by playing a piano with ivory keys or own a parrot or monkey as a living fashion accessory. In Victims of Fashion: Anim...

My Life in Propaganda: A Memoir about Language and Totalitarian Regimes (Durvile, 2023) is Magda Stroińska’s personal account of growing up with communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She looks at the influence of her family history that contradicted what she was taught at school; the cognitive and emotional effects of compulsory school readings; socialist realist art and film; and Radio Free Eur...

On November 20, 1983, a three-hour made-for-TV movie The Day After premiered on ABC. Set in the heartland of Lawrence, Kansas, the film depicted the events before, during, and after a Soviet nuclear attack with vivid scenes of the post-apocalyptic hellscape that would follow. The film was viewed by over 100 million Americans and remains the highest rated TV movie in history. After the premiere, AB...

To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts. Hyphen (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Dr. Pardis Mahdavi is part of the Object Lessons series and follows the story of the hyphen from antiquity-"Hyphen” is derived from an ancient Greek word meani...

The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Vineeta Sinha's Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia (Berghahn Books, 2023) critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnation...

Today I talked to Wayne Soon about his book Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford UP, 2020). In 1938, one year into the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese military found itself in dire medical straits. Soldiers were suffering from deadly illnesses, and were unable to receive blood transfusions for their wounds. The urgent need for medical assistance prompted an unprecedented f...

António Costa Pinto's book An Authoritarian Third Way in the Era of Fascism: Diffusion, Models and Interactions in Europe and Latin America (Routledge, 2021) takes a transnational and comparative approach that analyses the process of diffusion of a third way​ in selected transitions to authoritarianism in Europe and Latin America. When looking at the authoritarian wave of the 1930s, it is not diff...

Katlyn Marie Carter, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale UP, 2023) examines how debates over secrecy and transparency in politics during the eighteenth century shaped modern democracy. Does democracy die in darkness, as the saying suggests? This book reveals that modern democracy was born in secrecy, despite the widespread conviction that transparency wa...

Black vaudevillians and entertainers joked that T.O.B.A. stood for "tough on black artists." But the Theater Owner's Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) played a foundational role in the African American entertainment industry. T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners’ Booking Association in Jazz-Age America by Michelle R. Scott (University of Illinois Press, 2023) examines this circuit o...

Examining identity and nationalism in the Reconstruction-era South, Jack Noe’s Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South (Louisiana State University Press, 2021) investigates debates concerning the One Hundredth Anniversary of American Independence. This commemoration, which came only seven years after the conclusion of the Civil War, provide...

We often narrate the history of women’s rights in the United States by focusing on the fight for suffrage. Yet starting as early as 1835, states expanded married women’s economic rights. How were these statutes passed at a time when women’s political power was severely constrained, including no right to vote in most states? With limited national coordination?  In In Her Own Name: The Politics of W...