New Books in History

Throughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the Middle Ages as an era of darkness, Enlightenment thinkers tried to sweep superstition away with reason, the modern welfare state sought to slay the “giant” of ignorance, and in today’s hyperconnected world seemingly limitless information is available on demand. But what about t...

Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania is the first scholarly English-language study of Lithuania during World War II which utilizes previously inaccessible archives as well as academic works published in that country in the post-Soviet era. In the first chapters, the book examines the multifaceted relations of Lithuania's national communities before World War II and the international and dom...

From being a fringe political party in 2013 to sweeping nearly half of the state s forty-two Lok Sabha seats in 2019, the BJP has gained ground in West Bengal, aided partly by the RSS s exponential growth during Mamata Banerjee's chief ministerial tenure (2011 onwards). With a consistent and concerted criticism of the TMC, the saffron camp managed to create a strong wave of anti-incumbency. So muc...

Pamela Allen Brown joins Jana Byars to talk about The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford University Press, 2022), which traces the transnational connections between Shakespeare's all-male stage and the first female stars in the West. The book is the first to use Italian and English plays and other sources to explore this relationship, focusing on the gifted actress who radically altere...

Jana Byars talks to Erika Graham-Goering of the University of Oslo about Lordship and the Decentralized State in Late Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), which was edited by Graham-Goering, Jim van der Meulen, and Frederik Buylaert. The origins of modern European states are often traced back to the expansion of royal and princely authority in the late Middle Ages, transforming scatter...

The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role in the creation of this new cross-disciplinary field. In Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton University Press, 2025), Professor Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, internationa...

Our book is: The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) by award-winning historian Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers. Dr. Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson. Johnson was the owner of Blue Spring Farm, a veteran of the War of 1812...

Ada Palmer joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Inventing the Renaissance (U Chicago Press, 2025) and the ways history is written and used.  From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing t...

Four years ago, on Feb. 1 2021, the Burmese military overthrew the fledgling democratic government in the Southeast Asian country of Burma, officially known as Myanmar. That sparked a civil war that continues today–with neither the military junta nor the various rebel groups coming closer to victory. How did the country get here? Veteran Asia journalist Bertil Lintner tackles the country’s history...

In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society "to answer the great questions" of special importance to women: "What are we born to do? How shall we do it?" The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentali...

The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of “time.” But Pub also explores the hi...

Recognized for his work on philosophy, religion and politics, Dr. Sweet talks at length about Before and After Democracy: Philosophy, Religion, and Politics (Peeters, 2023). This book provides essential context for understanding contemporary debates on religion and politics. The first theme examines the origins of liberal democracy in the western world and the role of religion in the development o...

In The Ideological Scramble for Africa, Frank Gerits examines how African leaders in the 1950s and 1960s crafted an anticolonial modernization project. Rather than choose Cold War sides between East and West, anticolonial nationalists worked to reverse the psychological and cultural destruction of colonialism. Kwame Nkrumah's African Union was envisioned as a federation of liberation to challenge...

At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system that has, for more than fifty years, controlled the spread of these catastrophic weapons. The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime (Cornell UP, 2022) details how that regime works and how, disastro...

Two centuries ago, London school reformer Joseph Lancaster swept into New York City to revolutionize its public schools. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts passed laws mandating Lancaster's methods, and cities such as Albany, Savannah, Detroit, and Baltimore soon followed. In Mr. Lancaster's System: The Failed Reform That Created America's Public Schools (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Adam Laats tells the...

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday Books, 2025), Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embark...

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Andrea Chandler to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle. In the podcast we talked about why the relations between Canada and the countries of the Eastern bloc have so far been underreseached, about the large Central and Eastern European diaspora in Canada and their role in...

Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, history and ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Magdalena Buchczyk delves into the history and the changing material culture in Europe through the stories of a basket, a carpet, a waistcoat, a uniform, and a dress. The focus on the objects from the collection of the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin off...

Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces a complex history of caste, race, education, and Christian missions in colonial south India. It draws upon the vast Protestant Christian missionary archives of the London Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, and the Basel German Evangelical Missionary Society to showcase the processes of negotiat...

A companion piece to Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, Seven Sins and Seven Virtues (Abrams, 2024) by Dr. Ed Simon completes this moral trilogy and finally considers God’s most enigmatic of creations: None of the conundrums of metaphysics are as baroque as the motivations of the human soul. Unlike the devils condemned to perdition and the ange...

Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not always seen as violating a moral norm or inviting indignation. Could the concept of atrocity even exist before people could accuse their own country of mass violence committed against the inhabitants of another country?  In Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford UP, 2025), Bruce Robbins details how, when and where the concep...

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents.  Casting new light on how the theory'...

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. Using the writing...

The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsiders the story of American popular music, celebrity following, and fan behavior during World War II through close examination of “bobbysoxers.” Preserved in popular memory as primarily white, hysterical, teen girl devotees of Frank Sinatra clad in bob...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and when did we really start dreaming about the promise, and the danger, of artificial intelligence? When ChatGPT was released in 2022? When IBMs Deep Blue defeated Chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997? When Stanley Kubrick introduced us to HAL 9000 in 1968? Or perhaps you think it was much earlier. Maybe we have had the dream of AI since the development of the first...