Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)
How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to enslavement in his first nonfiction book, H...
9 Nov 20251h 27min
Ihnji Jon, "Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics" (Pluto Press, 2021)
Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern the...
8 Nov 202543min
E. Alaverdov and M. W. Bari, "Cultural Heritage Protection and Restoration in Conflict and Post-Conflict Zones" (IGI Global, 2025)
The protection and restoration of cultural heritage is essential, especially in conflict and post-conflict zones. Armed conflicts frequently result in the destruction or collateral damage of cultural ...
8 Nov 202538min
What Democracy Does… and Does Not Do
This week on Democratic Dialogues, host Rachel Beatty Riedl welcomes Maya Tudor, Professor of Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. In her recent a...
7 Nov 202529min
House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr.
At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan’s first Black member of Congr...
6 Nov 202555min
Jack B. Greenberg and John A. Dearborn, "Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Political Scientists Jack Greenberg (Yale University) and John Dearborn (Vanderbilt University) have a new book that focuses on the idea of presidential self-restraint and the ways in which the U.S. C...
5 Nov 202548min
Rachel Myrick, "Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Stability" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Polarization is a defining feature of politics in the United States and many other democracies. Yet although there is much research focusing on the effects of polarization on domestic politics, little...
1 Nov 202525min
Natasha Piano, "Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Do competitive elections secure democracy, or might they undermine it by breeding popular disillusionment with liberal norms and procedures? The so-called Italian School of Elitism, comprising Vilfred...
1 Nov 202556min
