Matthew Wilson, "Richard Congreve, Positivist Politics, the Victorian Press, and the British Empire" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)
Richard Congreve, Positivist Politics, the Victorian Press, and the British Empire (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) is about the life and times of Richard Congreve. This polemicist was the first thinker to ...
8 Apr 20221h 11min
Kate Clifford Larson, "Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer" (Oxford UP, 2021)
She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those befo...
7 Apr 202245min
Adrian Shubert, "The Sword of Luchana: Baldomero Espartero and the Making of Modern Spain, 1793–1879" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
Today I spoke to Prof. Adrian Shubert, professor of History at York University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada about his book on the nineteenth century Spanish soldier statesman Baldomero ...
7 Apr 202250min
Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)
Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of Spielberg as a Barnumesque purveyor of spectacle, L...
6 Apr 202248min
David Hajdu and John Carey, "A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge" (Columbia UP, 2021)
Too often, vaudeville is seen from the perspective of its decline: it is the corny, messy art form that predated the book musical, or that gave us Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx Brothers. Rarely is it ...
6 Apr 202252min
Robert Morstein-Marx, "Julius Caesar and the Roman People" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Julius Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but an unusually successful republican leader who was measured against the Republic's traditions and its greatest heroes o...
4 Apr 20221h 27min
Richard K. Rein, "American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life" (Island Press, 2022)
On an otherwise normal weekday in the 1980s, commuters on busy Route 1 in central New Jersey noticed an alarming sight: a man in a suit and tie dashing across four lanes of traffic, then scurrying thr...
1 Apr 202232min
Scott Kugle, "Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys Across the Indian Ocean" (UNC Press, 2021)
In his new book, Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys Across the Indian Ocean (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) and is available as an open-access enhanced edition, Scott Kugle follows the life a...
1 Apr 20221h 13min
