Barry W. Holtz, “Rabbi Akiva: Sage of the Talmud” (Yale UP, 2017)
Born in the Land of Israel around the year 50 C.E., Rabbi Akiva was the greatest rabbi of his time and one of the most important influences on Judaism as we know it today. Traditional sources tell how...
26 Sep 201753min
Deanne Stillman, “Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill” (Simon & Schuster, 2017)
In the summer of 1885, the Lakota Sioux holy man Sitting Bull toured North America as a member of Buffalo Bill Cody’s famous “Wild West” show. His participation, as Deanne Stillman explains in her boo...
25 Sep 201744min
Paige Bowers, “The General’s Niece: The Little-Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France” (Chicago Review Press, 2017)
When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevie...
19 Sep 201754min
Was Presidential Leadership Decisive in Determining the Outcome of the Civil War?
In the third podcast of Arguing History, historians William J. Cooper and Richard Carwardine address the question of the role presidential leadership played in determining the outcome of the American ...
12 Sep 20171h 15min
Joanna Dee Das, “Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora” (Oxford UP, 2017)
By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (Oxford Univ...
7 Sep 201747min
Tracy A. Thomas, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law” (NYU Press, 2016)
In this podcast I talk with Tracy A. Thomas about her book Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law (New York University Press, 2016). Professor Thomas is the John F. Seiberli...
6 Sep 20171h 2min
Tamara Plakins Thornton, “Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life” (UNC Press, 2016)
To remember Nathaniel Bowditch today primarily for his famous navigational textbook is to acknowledge only one of his many achievements. As Tamara Plakins Thornton demonstrates in her book Nathaniel B...
27 Aug 201749min
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars (SUNY Press, 2015)
When Dorothy Sterling wrote her book about nineteenth-century black women in America, she stated in the introduction that the book was not a definitive history of black women but a sourcebook to lead ...
26 Aug 201720min
