New Books in History
Interviews with Historians about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
Show episodes
Victor M. Valle, "The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands" (U New Mexico Press, 2023)
Chile is more than just spice, writes Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Cal Poly Ethnic Studies professor Victor Valle in The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands (U New Mexico Press, 2023). By tracing the meaning of chile as a plant and chile eating as an act. Valle shows how Indigenous cu
Elizabeth L. Block, "Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing" (MIT Press, 2024)
In the nineteenth century, the complex cultural meaning of hair was not only significant—it could affect one’s place in society. After the Civil War, hairdressing was a growing profession and the hair industry a mainstay of local, national, and international commerce. In Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdres
Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. Most forceful when winter turns to spring, the wind knocks over trees, sweeps trains off their tracks, and destroys crops. Yet the mistral turns the sky clear and blue, as
Melissa B. Reynolds, "Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
What do you do when you feel an itchy throat coming on? You probably head online, first to search for your symptoms and then to evaluate the information you found — just as ordinary 15th and 16th century English people would have sifted through information in their almanacs, medical recipe collections, and astrological
Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 (Knopf, 2024) traces the moral concerns and clashes of a nation re-building, re-constituting, and re-imagining itself from the depths of World War II to Chancellor Scholz’s Zeitenwende (‘new era’). Key elements of modern German identity, including the memory
Mark Celinscak, "Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp" (U Toronto Press, 2015)
The Allied soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 were faced with scenes of horror and privation. With breathtaking thoroughness, Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp (U Toronto Press, 2015) documents what they saw and ho