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New Books in Intellectual History

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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38:19

Duy Lap Nguyen, "Walter Benjamin and the Critique of...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/27

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as he fled the advance of the Third Reich on the French-Spanish border. Most writers and critics see Benjamin’s work as fragmented, disjointed, esoteric and dispersed, with no clear narrative or cohesive philosophy. Duy Lap Nguyen, Associate Professor in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, paints a different picture of Benjamin’s

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87:04

Bradley R. Simpson, "The First Right:...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/25

The idea of self-determination is one of the most significant in modern international politics. For more than a century diplomats, lawyers, scholars, activists, and ordinary people in every part of the globe have wrestled with its meaning and implications for decolonization, human rights, sovereignty, and international order. The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941-2000 (Oxford UP, 2025) argues that there was no one self-determination, but a

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46:04

Christian Raffensperger, "Authorship, Worldview, and...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/24

What did medieval authors know about their world? Were they parochial and focused on just their monastery, town, or kingdom? Or were they aware of the broader, medieval Europe that modern historians write about? Christian Raffensperger's edited volume Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 2022) brings the focus back to medieval authors to see how they describe their world. While we see in these essays that each author certainly had their own biases, the vast majority of

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57:21

Michelle Henning, "A Dirty History of Photography:...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/22

In A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire (U Chicago Press, 2026), Professor Michelle Henning presents an environmental history of chemical photography through the lens of its deep connections to empire and industry.Dependent on the extractive practices of fossil-fueled industrial capitalism, chemical photography’s emulsions and films were highly sensitive to polluted atmospheres, and photographic companies had to work hard to control this sensitivity. Drawing on histories of

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66:22

Michael P.M. Fox et al., eds., " Framing the First...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/21

The character of the conflict that erupted in 1914 defied the expectations of many political leaders and military analysts. Despite the mountains of books and articles published on World War I, there has been surprisingly little systematic or comparative research on how military commanders and politicians framed and interpreted the conflict—or, indeed, on how they understood war itself—and how that understanding shaped their decision-making.Wars are fought by organizations and people who have

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85:30

Duncan Kelly, "Worlds of Wartime: The First World War...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/19

Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Duncan Kelly is a new intellectual history of the many and varied ideas about politics and economics that were made, and remade, through wartime and revolution, by political and economic thinkers working across the globe, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Spanning continents, connecting networks of people, power, and possibilities, in new and often experimental ways, the worlds of wartime

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95:17

John Samuel Harpham, "Intellectual Origins of...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/19

The period from 1550 to 1700 was critical in the development of slavery across the English Atlantic world. During this time, English discourse about slavery revolved around one central question: How could free persons be made into slaves? John Samuel Harpham shows that English authors found answers to this question in a tradition of ideas that stretched back to the ancient world, where they were most powerfully expressed in Roman law. These ideas, in turn, became the basis for the earliest defenses

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51:13

Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/18

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America’s resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national

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62:09

Mark Christian Thompson, "Phenomenal Blackness:...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/18

Mark Christian Thompson's book, Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2022) examines the changing interdisciplinary investments of key mid-century African American writers and thinkers, showing how their investments in sociology and anthropology gave way to a growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory by the 1960s. Thompson analyzes this shift in intellectual focus across the post-war decades, pinpointing its clearest expression in

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57:58

Catherine Clarke, "A History of England in 25 Poems"...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/17

This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, which connect us directly with the nation’s past, and the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those who lived it.These poems open windows onto wildly different worlds – from the public to the intimate, from the witty to the savage, from the playful to the wistful. They take us onto battlefields, inside royal courts, down coal mines and below

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41:59

Mary E. Stuckey, "Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was,...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/17

Mary E. Stuckey, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, has a brilliant new book that dives into the question of who we are as Americans, a theme that Stuckey has long researched and considered in much of her work (Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity, University Press of Kansas, 2004; For the Enjoyment of the People: The Creation of National Identity in American Public Lands, University Press of Kansas, 2023), but she

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59:38

Sheiba Kian Kaufman, "Persian Paradigms in Early...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/15

Persian Paradigms in Early Modern English Drama examines the concept of early modern globality and the development of European toleration discourse through English representations of Persian monarchs and Persianate conceptions of hospitality as paradigms of interreligious and intercultural hospitality for early modern and Shakespearean drama.English playwrights depict Persia and its legendary monarchs, such as Cyrus the Great, Xerxes, and Darius, as alternative figures of cosmopolitanism in the

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78:32

Angie Hobbs, "Why Plato Matters Now" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/14

Does Plato matter? An ancient philosopher whose work has inspired and informed countless thinkers and poets across the centuries, his ideas are no longer taught as widely as they once were. But, as Angie Hobbs argues in this clear-sighted book Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury, 2025), that is a mistake.If we want to understand the world we live in – from democracy, autocracy and fake news to celebrity, cancel culture and what money can and cannot do – there is no better place to start than Plato

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59:38

Miriam Udel, "Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/14

As migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the long twentieth century, an increasingly global community of speakers and readers clung to Jewish heritage while striving to help their children make sense of their lives as Jews in the modern world. In her book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature (Princeton University Press, 2025), Miriam Udel traces how the stories and poems written for these Yiddish-speaking children underpinned new formulations of secular

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63:34

Douglas Greene, "In Stalin's Shadow: Trotsky and the...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/14

Most people on the contemporary left see Stalin as an unfortunate stain on the history of the global left, a part of the historical process that we’d be better avoiding in our attempts to build towards socialism. He does still have some scattered defenders though, putting out books and articles trying to turn his legacy into something commendable that we ought to try and build upon today. Returning today is Douglas Greene, who is not one of his defenders, but instead has written a book exploring the

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43:40

Paul J. Gutacker, "The Old Faith in a New Nation:...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/13

Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone." The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past (Oxford UP, 2023) challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals

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61:26

Noam Sienna, "Jewish Books in North Africa: Between...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/13

Author Noam Sienna unveils a vast Sephardic world created by these books. This literary network transcended geographical boundaries, connecting Jewish communities from Fez and Tunis to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Livorno. By examining cultural centers and tracing the journey of these texts, Sienna provides depth to our understanding of a remarkably global and worldly book culture, and its evolving role in the growth of Jewish modernity.While the content of Jewish books has long fascinated

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89:30

Shuchen Xiang, "Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/12

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and

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57:22

Tony Spawforth, "What the Greeks Did for Us" (Yale...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/11

Our contemporary world is inescapably Greek. Whether in a word like “pandemic,” a Freudian state of mind like the “Oedipus complex,” or a replica of the Parthenon in a Chinese theme park, ancient Greek culture shapes the contours of our lives. Ever since the first Roman imitators, we have been continually falling under the Greeks’ spell. But how did ancient Greece spread its influence so far and wide? And how has this influence changed us? In What the Greeks Did for Us (Yale UP, 2023), Tony

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61:32

Jürgen Zimmerer, "Memory Wars: New German Historical...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/10

Erinnerungskämpfe: Neues deutsches Geschichtsbewusstsein (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2023) is a new, provocative volume on German memory cultures and politics edited by Jürgen Zimmerer. What can be loosely translated as Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness is a collection of chapters that lay bare a mosaic of a diverse German memory landscape as well as the major debates and turning points by which it is continuously shaped. It is subdivided in five sections together encompassing 23 chapters and

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