New Books in Politics and Polemics

Historically, foreign policy has been seen as a sphere shaped and determined by the concerns of men alone. In ‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Julie Gottlieb demonstrates the fallacy of such a view when applied to understanding how Britain responded to the growing... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppor...

Psychoanalysis has a reputation for insularity, often limiting its interest and scope to events in the consulting room. But the origins of Freud’s notion of free speech bear meaningful similarities to the Founding Fathers’ conception of free speech, sparking curiosity about how psychoanalysis and democracy might speak to one another.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoice...

In the age of the railroad, social movements, revivals, and campaigns for political office spread like wildfire across the United States. Leaders and their surrogates could go travel faster than ever before, even as industrial capitalism overthrew the public and private relationships of a previous era. As would-be movement leaders... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices S...

Brian F. Harrison and Melissa R. Michelson‘s, Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a broad interrogation of the way that public opinion is formed (or reformed) and activated, and specifically focuses on what transpired over the past fifteen years... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by be...

In 1959, approximately 2,000 members of the the Latvian Communist Party were purged for “nationalist tendencies.” However, the causes of their rise and their fall reached all the way to the Soviet Politburo in Moscow. William Prigge analyzes how “nationalist” communists came to power in the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

In the preface to his new book, Timothy Cheek calls out a widespread tendency to focus on dissidents when engaging with Chinese intellectuals. (This is a problem insofar as we use these intellectuals as a mirror for our own concerns, hopes, and fears.) Instead, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

Among the most powerful and equally insidious aspects of the new global politics of religion is the discourse of religious moderation that seeks to produce moderate religious subjects at ease with the aims and fantasies of liberal secular politics. For Muslim communities in the US and beyond, few expectations and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by...

Kent State University is associated indelibly with the events of May 4, 1970, when soldiers of the Ohio National Guard shot over a dozen students, killing four of them. In Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), Thomas M. Grace, a historian who... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premi...

Over half of Americans approaching retirement age report having no money saved for retirement, but how did we get here as a nation? In his book, Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal (ILR/Cornell University Press, 2017) Dr. Michael A. McCarthy takes the reader through the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sh...

One of the rising stars in American politics during the 1930s was Paul Vories McNutt. As governor of Indiana, McNutt refashioned the state government to address its citizens needs during the Great Depression, and was seen by many of his contemporaries as a future president of the United States. Yet... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a pre...

Caterina Corner lived a life that was composed of a mixture of adventure, power, and tragedy. The daughter of a Venetian patrician and merchant, she was married to the king of Cyprus while barely a teenager. Within two years of voyaging to her new home in 1472, she became a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newb...

In The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia (Central European University Press, 2014), Melissa Chakars reveals not only how Soviet policies disrupted traditional Buryat ways of life, but also how Buryats adapted to build a modern educated society in the post-war period. Ethnic Buryats were proportionally over-represented... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone....

Robert Jervis is the author of How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2017). Jervis is the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics at Columbia University. Drawing on the increasing attention researchers in the field of psychology are paying to emotions, Jervis shows how emotional... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone...

In Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (University of California Press, 2016), Emily K. Hobson challenges conceptions of LGBTQ activism as single-issue analogous to but separate from other activist initiatives. Instead, Hobson uncovers the gay and lesbian left, whose activists saw sexual liberation as... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adcho...

John William McCormack served as Speaker of the House of Representatives throughout most of the 1960s, during which time he shepherded the legislation of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program through the chamber. As Garrison Nelson demonstrates in John William McCormack: A Political Biography (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), this was the culmination... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon...

Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) offers a compelling investigation of Soviet leisure culture. Gleb Tsipursky undertakes an unexpected approach to illuminate some aspects of the USSR history, which have been previously disregarded. Describing leisure activities that were... Learn more about y...

Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution was published by Microcosm Publishing in 2017. This is the intertwining story of two women: Lola, who was born in a Jewish family in Kiev in 1910, and her great-granddaughter Julia, whose family moved to the United States from Ukraine in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becom...

In Washington and Hamilton: The Alliance that Forged America (Sourcebooks, 2015), authors Stephen F. Knott and Tony Williams explore the relationship between George Washington and Alexander Hamilton over the course of three distinct periods where their personal and philosophical collaboration contributed to the establishment of the United States and the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m...

Policing tactics have recently been the subject of lively political debates and the target of protest groups like the Black Lives Matter movement. Police reform is not new, of course. The 1950s and 1960s, in fact, saw one of the most active periods of change surrounding standard policing procedures and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a...

Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) explores the drug culture of Nazi Germany. Far from being a nation of physical and mental purity portrayed by Goebbels’s propaganda machine, Ohler shows Germany was a hub of drug production and abuse during the 1920s. Manufacturers like... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sh...

At the start of the twentieth century Britain’s relationship with China was defined by the economic and political dominance Britain exerted in the country as an imperial power, a dominance that would ebb over the next three decades. In Britain’s Imperial Retreat from China, 1900-1931 (Routledge, 2017), Phoebe Chow describes... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

Does patronage always imply a corruption of democratic political processes? Across sixteen essays by historians, political scientists and anthropologists Patronage as Politics in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2014), edited by Anastasia Piliavsky, explores this question and many more across a range of historical and cultural contexts. The volume’s collective... Learn more about your ad ch...

During a life that stretched from the Progressive era to the 1960s, A. J. Muste dedicated himself to fighting against war and the exploitation of working Americans. In American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Leilah Danielson describes... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our s...

In The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2016), acclaimed historian Michael Neiberg examines the background of war fever in the United States between 1914 to 1917 to present a new interpretation on the nation’s slide to entering the First World War... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a pr...

How did the idea of time change during the nineteenth century? In Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the British World (Oxford University Press, 2015) Ryan Vieira, a sessional lecturer at McMaster University, explores Parliament in the nineteenth century to understand both the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoice...